South Africaofficially Republic of South Africa, formerly Union of South Africa, the southernmost country on the African continent. It has an area of 470,693 square miles (1,219,090 square kilometres). It measures almost 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometres) from north to south, as well as from east to west. South Africa is bordered by Namibia to the northwest, by Botswana and Zimbabwe to the north, and by Mozambique and Swaziland to the northeast and east. Lesotho, an independent constitutional monarchy, is entirely surrounded by South African territory in the eastern part of the republic. South Africa’s coastlines border the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. The capitals are , renowned for its varied topography, great natural beauty, and cultural diversity, all of which have made the country a favoured destination for travellers since the legal ending of apartheid (Afrikaans: “apartness,” or racial separation) in 1994.

South Africa’s remoteness—it lies thousands of miles distant from major African cities such as Lagos and Cairo and more than 6,000 miles (10,000 km) away from most of Europe, North America, and eastern Asia, where its major trading partners are located—helped reinforce the official system of apartheid for a large part of the 20th century. With that system, the government, controlled by the minority white population, enforced segregation between government-defined races in housing, education, and virtually all spheres of life, creating in effect three nations: one of whites (consisting of peoples primarily of British and Dutch [Boer] ancestry, who struggled for generations to gain political supremacy, a struggle that reached its violent apex with the South African War of 1899–1902); one of blacks (consisting of such peoples as the San hunter-gatherers of the northwestern desert, the Zulu herders of the eastern plateaus, and the Khoekhoe farmers of the southern Cape regions); and one of “Coloureds” (mixed-race people) and ethnic Asians (Indians, Malays, Filipinos, and Chinese). The apartheid regime was disdained and even vehemently opposed by much of the world community, and by the mid-1980s South Africa found itself among the world’s pariah states, the subject of economic and cultural boycotts that affected almost every aspect of life. During this era the South African poet Mongane Wally Serote remarked,

There is an intense need for self-expression among the oppressed in our country. When I say self-expression I don’t mean people saying something about themselves. I mean people making history consciously….We neglect the creativity that has made the people able to survive extreme exploitation and oppression. People have survived extreme racism. It means our people have been creative about their lives.

Eventually forced to confront the untenable nature of ethnic separatism in a multicultural land, the South African government of F.W. de Klerk (1989–94) began to repeal apartheid laws. That process in turn set in motion a transition toward universal suffrage and a true electoral democracy, which culminated in the 1994 election of a government led by the black majority under the leadership of the long-imprisoned dissident Nelson Mandela. As this transition attests, the country has made remarkable progress in establishing social equity in a short period of time.

South Africa has three cities that serve as capitals: Pretoria (executive), Cape Town (legislative), and Bloemfontein (judicial).

South Africa is relatively isolated, distant even from major African cities such as Nairobi, Kenya (more than 1,500 miles away), and Lagos, Nigeria (more than 2,400 miles away); it is 5,100 miles from South America, 4,700 miles from Australia, and more than 6,000 miles from most of Europe, North America, and eastern Asia, where many of its major economic links lie.

The four original provinces of South Africa—Cape of Good Hope, Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal—were reorganized in 1994 into nine new provinces: Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern, North-West, Free State, Gauteng, Eastern Transvaal, Northern, and KwaZulu/Natal; Eastern Transvaal subsequently was renamed Mpumalanga. South Africa Johannesburg, the largest urban area in the country and a centre of commerce, lies at the heart of the populous Gauteng province. Durban, a port on the Indian Ocean, is a major industrial centre. East London and Port Elizabeth, both of which lie along the country’s southern coast, are important commercial, industrial, and cultural centres.

Today South Africa enjoys a relatively stable mixed economy that draws on its fertile agricultural lands, abundant mineral resources, tourist attractions, and highly evolved intellectual capital. Greater political equality and economic stability, however, do not necessarily mean social tranquility. South African society at the start of the 21st century continued to face steep challenges: rising crime rates, ethnic tensions, great disparities in housing and educational opportunities, and the AIDS pandemic.

Land

South Africa is bordered by Namibia to the northwest, by Botswana and Zimbabwe to the north, and by Mozambique and Swaziland to the northeast and east. Lesotho, an independent country, is an enclave in the eastern part of the republic, entirely surrounded by South African territory. South Africa’s coastlines border the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the southwest. The country possesses two small subantarctic islands, Prince Edward and Marion, situated in the Indian Ocean about 1,200 miles (1,900 km) southeast of Cape Town. The former South African possession of Walvis Bay,

an enclave

on the Atlantic coast some 400 miles (600 km) north of the Orange River,

was transferred to

became part of Namibia in 1994.

South Africa has long been a focus of world attention. The former South African government, dominated by the minority white population, maintained a policy of apartheid (“apartness”) that enforced segregation between government-defined races in housing, education, and many other spheres of life. Apartheid evoked vehement opposition internally and from most countries in the world. In 1990 the South African government began repealing the apartheid laws, initiating the transition to government led by the black majority. This process culminated in the permanent nonracial constitition promulgated in 1997.

The land

Relief

A plateau that covers the largest part of the countrydominates , dominating the topography. It ; it is separated from surrounding areas of generally lower elevation by the Great Escarpment. The plateau consists almost entirely of very old rock of the Karoo (Karroo) System, which formed from the Late Carboniferous Epoch (320 about 318 to 286 299 million years ago) to the Late Triassic Epoch (230 about 228 to 208 200 million years ago). The plateauis , generally highest in the east, dropping drops from elevations of more than 8,000 feet (2,440 400 metres) in the basaltic Lesotho region to about 2,000 feet (600 metres) in the sandy Kalahari in the west. The central part of the plateau comprises the Highveld, which is reaches between 4,000 and 6,000 feet (1,200 and 1,800 metres) in elevation. South of the Orange River lies the Great Karoo region.

The Great Escarpment (see Drakensberg), known by a variety of local names such as uKhahlamba (Zulu: “Barrier of Spears”) and the Natal Drakensberg, forms the longest continuous topographic feature in South Africa and provides scenery of great beauty. The escarpment is part of uKhahlamba/Drakensberg Park, which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. It runs southward from the far northeast, where it is generally known as the Transvaal Drakensberg (berg and berge in Afrikaans means “mountains”). Farther south it Afrikaans: “Dragon Mountains”). It is there, in KwaZulu-Natal province, that the country’s highest point, Njesuthi (11,181 feet [3,408 metres]), is found. Farther south the escarpment forms the boundary first between KwaZulu/-Natal and Free State provinces and then between KwaZulu/-Natal and Lesotho. There it reaches heights up to elevations of nearly 11,000 feet (3,300 metres), including some of the country’s highest peaks, such as Mont aux Sources (10,823 feet [3,299 metres]); it is known both as Khahlamba (in Zulu) and as the Natal Drakensberg. The mountainous escarpment continues southwestward, dividing Lesotho from the Transkei region of Eastern province. At lesser altitudes Cape province, where it runs westward across Eastern Cape at lesser elevations of 5,000 to 8,000 feet , it runs westward across Eastern province, where it (1,500 to 2,400 metres) and is known as the Stormberg. Farther to the west , with names such as it becomes the Nuweveld Range and the Roggeveld Mountains , it and forms the approximate boundary between Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces. At its western extreme, in the vicinity of Mount Bokkeveld and Mount Kamies (5,600 feet [1,700 metres]), the escarpment is not well defined.

An area of very old ancient folded mountains with altitudes elevations between 3,000 and 7,600 feet (900 and 2,300 metres) lies in the southwest of the country; it includes ranges such as the Tsitsikama, Outeniqua, Great Groot-Swart, Lange, SederCeder, Drakenstein, and Hottentots Holland Mountainsmountains, as well as Table Mountain and its associated features at Cape Town.

Both above and below the Great Escarpment, the topography tends to be relatively broken. Open plains are relatively rare, occurring mainly in northwestern Free State and farther to the west and in smaller areas such as the Springbok Flats north of Pretoria. Ridges, mountains, and deeply incised valleys are common, mainly left by the erosion of very old ancient landforms. Between There is little genuine coastal plain between the escarpment and the seathere is little genuine coastal plain, with exceptions , except in northern KwaZulu/-Natal, where it reaches a width of about 50 miles in width(80 km), and in parts of Western Cape. For most of its 1,836-mile (2,955-km) length, the coastline is characterized by consists of fairly steep slopes rising rapidly inland and often includes long stretches of beach. Most of the coastline has experienced uplift been uplifted or created by falling sea levels in the recent geologic past, with the result that there are few flooded river valleys or natural harboursoccur. Exceptions include the Knysna Lagoon in Western Cape and the Buffalo River at East London. Long stretches of beach are common. In KwaZulu/-Natal, longshore drift over many centuries has created spits and bluffs from beach sand; in a number of places these features have enclosed bays, which have provided both remarkable sanctuaries for wildlife (as at the St. Lucia estuary) and, when mouths are dredged, good harbours (as at Durban and Richard’s Richards Bay).

Drainage

The Rising in the Lesotho Highlands, the Orange River and its tributaries—chiefly the Caledon and the Vaal—drain the greater part of the country (about 329,000 square miles ) is drained [852,000 square km]) to the Atlantic Oceanby the Orange River, which rises in the Lesotho Highlands, and its tributaries. Chief among the latter are the Caledon and the Vaal. North of the Witwatersrand (Rand) ridge, the plateau is drained to the Indian Ocean by the Limpopo system, with whose major tributaries in include the Krokodil, Mogalakwena, Luvuvhu, and Olifants rivers. South of the Olifants River, in the area between the escarpment and the seais drained by , a large number of other river systems, such as including the Komati, PongolaPongolo, Mfolozi, and Mgeni, the largest of which is the and Tugela, draining drain much of KwaZulu/Natal and ranking -Natal; the Tugela ranks as the largest river by volume in the country. To the south the MkhomaziThe Mkomazi, Mzimvubu, Great Kei, Great Fish, Sundays, and Gourits rivers drain significant areas ; the Western Cape fold mountain region is drained mainly by the Breefarther south, while the Breë, Berg, and Olifants rivers . All mainly drain the Western Cape fold mountain region. The flows of all South African rivers are highly seasonalin flow, and few offer a level-enough gradient and sufficient volume to allow navigation by even small craft for more than a few miles from the river their mouths.

Soils

Three South Africa contains three major soil regionsmay be distinguished. East of approximately longitude 25° E, soils have formed under wet summer and dry winter conditions, ; the more-important soil types being there are laterite (red, leached, iron-bearing soil)and other lateritic soils, unleached subtropical soils, and gleylike (i.e., bluish gray, sticky, and compact) podzolic soils (highly leached soils that are low in iron and lime). A second major region lies within winter and all-season rainfall areas in Eastern and Western Cape; its soils are generally an area receiving year-round precipitation in Western Cape and Eastern Cape and generally contains gray sandy and sandy loam in typesoils. Over most of the rest of the country, which is generally dry, the characteristic soils are characterized by comprise a sandy top layer, often a sandy loam, underlain by a layer of lime or an accretion of silica. With some exceptions, South Africa’s soils are not characterized by high fertility, and those that are—for example, in coastal KwaZulu/-Natal—tend to be easily degraded.

Climate

The climate is varied but affected by three main factors. First, South Africa’s location between latitudes 22° and 35° S places almost Almost the entire country lies within the temperate zone; , and extremes of heat and cold are rare. However, its Its location next to a subtropical high-pressure belt of descending air produces stable atmospheric conditions unconducive to rainfall over most of its surface . The result is a generally dry climate.Second, area, and the climate generally is dry.

Because most of the country lies at fairly high elevationselevation, which tempers the influence of latitudeand makes , even the tropical and near-tropical inland northern areas are much cooler than would otherwise be the case. High altitude elevation and lack of the moderating influence of the sea give produce large diurnal temperature variations in most inland areaslarge daily variations in temperature. Third, the .

The climate is greatly influenced by the ocean oceans that surrounds surround the country to the east, south, and west. The temperate cyclones of the southern ocean exercise considerable influence on weather patterns, especially in winter, when their circulation moves northward. The cold , northward-flowing Benguela Current not only cools the west coast considerably but also contributes to the dryness and stability of the atmosphere over the western parts of the country, while the warm , southward-flowing Mozambique and Agulhas currents keep temperatures higher on the east and southeast coastcoasts. The resultant warmer and less-dense air rises more readily, facilitating the entry of rainmoisture-bearing clouds from the east.

South Africa , as well as and the adjoining ocean areas , is are influenced throughout the year by descending, divergent upper air masses that circulate primarily eastward, generally causing fine weather and low annual precipitation, especially to the west. During winter (June to August), cold polar air moves over the southwestern, southern, and southeastern coastal areas, sometimes reaching the southern interior of the country from the southwest. These polar masses are accompanied by cold fronts as well as by rain and snow. In summer (December to February), the Atlantic high-pressure system settles semipermanently over the southern and western parts of the country. Local heating of the landmass sometimes causes low-pressure conditions to develop, resulting in and rain-bearing tropical air masses being are drawn in from the Indian Ocean over the northeastern regionand bringing rain.

South Africa is a generally semiaridcountry where ; its precipitation is highly variable, and farmers often face water shortages. More than one-fifth of the country is arid , receiving and receives less than 8 inches (200 millimetresmm) of rainfall precipitation annually; , while almost half is semiarid , receiving 8 to 24 inches. In most of these areas, rainfall is highly variable and generally unreliable. Only and receives between 8 and 24 inches (200 and 600 mm) annually. Only about 6 percent of the country receives averages more than 40 inches of rain annually. From east to west there is a gradual decline in the rainfall. The KwaZulu/(1,000 mm) per year. The amount of precipitation gradually declines from east to west. Whereas the KwaZulu-Natal coast receives more than 40 inches annually, (1,000 mm) annually and Kimberley approximately 16 inches (400 mm), and Alexander Bay on the west coast receives less than 2 inches (50 mm).

Summers are warm to hot, with daytime temperatures generally from 70° 70 to 90° F 90 °F (21° 21 to 32° C32 °C). Higher altitudes elevations have the lower temperatures, while the far northern and northeastern regions and the western plateau and river valleys in the central and southern regions have the higher temperatures. At night , temperatures fall substantially in the interior—in some places by as much as 30° F (17° C30 °F (17 °C)—while on the coast the daily range is much smaller. Winters are mostly cool to cold, with many high-altitude higher areas often having temperatures below freezing at night but readings of 50° 50 to 70° F 70 °F (10° 10 to 21° C21 °C) in the daytime. On ; however, winters are warm on the eastern and southeastern coast, winters are warmcoasts. Temperatures generally decline from east to west: Durban has an annual average temperature of 69° F (21° C69 °F (21 °C), while Port Nolloth—at a similar latitude but on the west coast—registers 57° F (14° C57 °F (14 °C).

Plant and animal life

Flora and fauna

Natural vegetation varies from savanna (parklike grassland with trees) in the Bushveld and Lowveld of Mpumalanga and

Northern

Limpopo provinces through grassland with fewer trees in the Highveld to scrub (fynbos) and scattered bush in the Karoo and drier western areas and even includes desert on the edge of the Kalahari in the north. Western Cape has a distinct vegetation of grasses, shrubs, and trees able to withstand the long, dry summers and is the home of many of South Africa’s 20,000 species of flowering plants. The eastern coast has a more tropical plant life. Sections of Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces collectively form the Cape Floral Region, known for its rich diversity of plant life and designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. Natural forest is limited to mountainous valleys along the Great Escarpment and a few other favoured localities, in particular the Knysna area of the southern coast. The desert region includes such vegetation as narras (Ancanthosicyos horridus), a shrub with an edible fruit, and mongongo nut (Ricinodendron rautennii), a tree with a hollow trunk. Human settlement, herding, and cultivation practices have significantly altered natural vegetation for at least two millennia. White (European) inhabitants have accelerated these processes by introducing exotic plant species; urban growth, rapid population expansion, and the spread of market agriculture, especially since the late 19th century, have also contributed to this change.

South Africa has a rich and varied mammal life, with more than 200 species, including such large animals

such

as lions, leopards, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, baboons, zebras, and many kinds of antelope. Smaller creatures include mongooses, jackals, and various cats

. However, the

such as the caracal. The numbers of animals declined greatly, however, during the expansion of white settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries, and today large

indigenous

mammals

occur

exist mainly in the country’s wildlife reserves

, of which Kruger National Park is the best known. There are

. South Africa contains more than 800 species of birds, such as the bearded vulture, the bald ibis, and the black eagle; many species of reptiles, including more than 100

snake species

varieties of snakes (of which one-

quarter

fourth are poisonous)

,

; and an

extraordinary diversity

extraordinarily diverse population of insects.

Settlement patternsThe population of South Africa is concentrated in three main ways. First, more than 95 percent of the people

Conservation

The country contains more than a dozen national parks. The largest, Kruger National Park in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, is noted for its populations of rhinoceroses, elephants, and buffalo, as well as a variety of other wildlife. Mountain Zebra National Park in Eastern Cape province shelters the endangered mountain zebra; Addo Elephant National Park, also in Eastern Cape, protects more of the elephant population; and Bontebok National Park in Western Cape contains the endangered bontebok (a type of antelope). Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park in KwaZulu-Natal, inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1999, provides a protected environment for the Nile crocodile, a large hippopotamus population, and many species of birds, in addition to other animals. Regulated big-game hunting of elephants, white rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, buffalo, and many types of antelope is allowed in the country during certain months of the year. Grysboks, klipspringers, and red hartebeests (all varieties of antelope), giraffes, black rhinoceroses, pangolins (anteaters), and antbears are specially protected animals that cannot be hunted.

Conservation efforts in Southern Africa have been aided by the creation of transfrontier parks and conservation areas, which link nature reserves and parks in neighbouring countries to create large, international conservation areas that protect biodiversity and allow a wider range of movement for migratory animal populations. One such park is the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which links Kruger National Park with Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park and Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park. Another is Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which links South Africa’s Kalahari Gemsbok National Park with Botswana’s Gemsbok National Park.

People

Ethnic groups

Government-determined “racial” and ethnic classification, embodied in the Population Registration Act in effect from 1950 to 1991, was crucial in determining the status of all South Africans under apartheid. The act divided South Africans at birth into four “racial” categories—black, white, Coloured (mixed race), and Asian—though these classifications were largely arbitrary, based on considerations such as family background and cultural acceptance as well as on appearance.

The original Khoekhoe and San peoples of South Africa scarcely exist as distinct groups inside the country today. Many intermarried with other African peoples who arrived before European conquest, and others intermarried with Malagasy and Southeast Asian slaves under white rule to form the majority of the Coloured population. Bantu-speaking Africans entered the area from the north roughly 1,800 years ago; their descendants today constitute about three-fourths of South Africa’s population.

The population formerly classified as Coloured descended from Khoisan (Khoekhoe and San) peoples, slaves imported by the Dutch from Madagascar and what are now Malaysia and Indonesia, Europeans, and Bantu-speaking Africans. Several distinct subethnic groups can still be identified, such as the Malays, who largely originated from Indonesian Muslim slaves, and the Griquas, who trace their origins to a specific historical Khoekhoe community. While some Malays and Griquas have continued to identify themselves as Coloured, others who were so classified by the apartheid government have rejected the label entirely. In many respects they cannot be distinguished culturally or physically from the white population. Those formerly classified as Coloured are concentrated in the western half of the country, particularly in Western and Northern Cape provinces and the westernmost parts of Eastern Cape province, where they form a majority in most districts.

South Africans of Indian descent, who were classified under apartheid as Asian, form a large minority. They went to South Africa originally as indentured workers imported by the British to the former Natal colony beginning in the 1850s and were followed by a smaller group of immigrant traders later in the 19th century. Most of them now live in KwaZulu-Natal and to a lesser extent in Gauteng, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga provinces. Almost all Indian South Africans are urban dwellers. Small communities of other ethnic Asians, including Chinese, live in some of the cities.

Most white South Africans are descendants of European settlers—primarily from Great Britain, Germany, and The Netherlands—who began to migrate to South Africa in the mid-17th century.

Languages

The black African population is heterogeneous, falling mainly into four linguistic categories. The largest is the Nguni, including various peoples who speak Swati (primarily the Swazi peoples) as well as those who speak languages that take their names from the peoples by whom they are primarily spoken—the Ndebele, Xhosa, and Zulu (see also Xhosa language; Zulu language). They constitute more than half the black population of the country and form the majority in many eastern and coastal regions as well as in the industrial Gauteng province. The second largest is Sotho-Tswana, again including various peoples whose language names are derived from the names of peoples who primarily speak them—the Sotho, Pedi, and Tswana. Speakers of Sotho-Tswana languages constitute a majority in many Highveld areas. The other two primary linguistic groups are the Tsonga (or Shangaan) speakers (primarily the Tsonga peoples), concentrated in Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, and the Venda speakers (primarily the Venda peoples), located largely in Limpopo province.

White South Africans form two main language groups. More than half of them are Afrikaans speakers, the descendants of mostly Dutch, French, and German settlers. The remainder consists largely of English speakers who are descended mainly from British colonists, though there are a sizable minority of Portuguese and smaller groups of Italians and others. Most of the population formerly classified as Coloured speaks Afrikaans or, to a lesser extent, English.

Eleven languages (Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Pedi, Sotho, Swati, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu) hold official status under the 1996 constitution, and an additional 11 (Arabic, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu) are to be promoted and developed; all languages are spoken to varying degrees in different regions. In some rural areas most residents speak neither Afrikaans nor English, but those two languages allow for communication in most parts of the country. English appears to predominate to an increasing extent in official, educational, and formal business spheres, which reflects a shift away from Afrikaans as the predominant language of government.

Religion

The vast majority of South Africans are Christians. The largest established Christian denominations directly rooted in European settlement but now drawing members from all ethnic groups are the Methodist, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Dutch Reformed churches. A large number of people follow independent African Christian churches, which vary in size from a few to millions of members. These faiths differ widely in their degree of theological orthodoxy or heterodoxy from traditional Christian beliefs, but they tend to be more open to aspects of indigenous culture and religion and to emphasize physical and spiritual healing. The other major religions are Hinduism, among the majority of Indians; Islam, among many Indians and Malays; and Judaism, among a significant minority of the white population.

Settlement patterns

More than nine-tenths of the inhabitants live in the eastern half of the country and in the southern coastal regions. The western partsIn contrast, the western region, except for the area around Cape Town in the extreme southwest, are very is sparsely populated. Second, well over Urban areas contain more than half the populationlives in urban areas, and many of those live in or around the major cities. Finally, about half ; many of these consist of huge informal or squatter settlements that lack the basic infrastructure for transportation, water, sanitation, or electricity. A large part of the black population is concentrated in the former “homeland” (Bantustan) areas, scattered territories in the northern and eastern parts of the country that were established during the apartheid period as segregated living areas for Africans. Far from urban facilities, left to blacks after the 19th-century wars of white conquest and dispossession. Under apartheid, millions of nonwhites were forcibly relocated from cities and white-owned farms into the Bantustans. Boundary changes also placed many large informal settlements under Bantustan jurisdiction, so that some of these areas came to exhibit urban, rather than rural, population densities.

Rural

land is predominantly owned today by whites but was historically settled by blacks in much of the country. Traditional African

settlement

Whites own the majority of rural land, although blacks originally settled most of it. Traditional black settlements consisted of farming homesteads or villages

(kraals); the

. The land belonged to the community,

each household receiving from

and the chief or headman granted each household the right to build a home and

to

cultivate an area of land. Pastoral land around the

kraal

area was used communally. Conquest and the establishment of white authority and private ownership of land made these settlement patterns subordinate to others. In places where

Africans

blacks retained their access to land, however, elements of these patterns

survive. Examples of distinctly precolonial settlement forms are rare, but they may

survived and may still be found in the more-remote parts of certain reserve areas.

In areas where

Where sharecropping and labour tenancy have provided

Africans

blacks with access to farmland, a local architecture using industrial as well as more-traditional materials has developed. About one-sixth of the

African

black population lives on farmland owned by whites.

Rural patterns created by white settlement from the late 17th century

differ in being centred around single homesteads

onward were centred on privately owned farmsteads, usually considerable distances apart, each having its associated cluster of

sharecroppers’

sharecropper,

tenants’

tenant, or

employees’ houses

employee housing. As the frontier of white settlement expanded in the 18th and 19th centuries,

the establishment of farms often involved

each farmer

claiming

claimed land, often several thousand acres,

resulting in a dispersed

and this gave rise to a settlement pattern

with homesteads sometimes miles apart

of widely dispersed homesteads. Smaller farms and more-intensive cultivation, however, always existed in some areas, such as the grape-growing areas of the southwest.

From the late 19th century, as the

As the urban demand for food and other agricultural produce grew rapidly from the late 19th century, many farms closer to towns or in more-favourable ecological zones were subdivided, and a denser pattern emerged. More recently

there

the general tendency has been

a general tendency

for farm sizes to increase

as

and the number of landowners

has declined

to decline. The population of farmworker residents has also decreased as mechanized production methods and corporate farm ownership have become more widespread.

Urban settlement

Urban settlement in South Africa originated both

with the concentration

as concentrations of population around the political centres of African chiefdoms and kingdoms and

with the

as towns established by European colonizers.

The general defeat of African

For reasons of water availability and land-use patterns, Sotho-Tswana peoples of the interior generally lived in large settlements, the largest having tens of thousands of inhabitants, while coastal Nguni peoples lived in a more dispersed manner. The defeat of black polities by whites and their allies, particularly during the 19th century, led to the abandonment or destruction of capitals such as Dithakong, a Tswana stronghold in what is now Northern Cape, and Ulundi,

the

a major Zulu

citadel in northern Natal

royal village in central Zululand (now northern KwaZulu

/

-Natal).

Where African

Those black-established settlements that survived

, they

tended to be subordinated politically and economically to the colonial centres established alongside them, as at Mafikeng.

European colonization of South Africa began with towns, Cape Town being the first, in 1652.

Under

The Dutch

rule,

established a few

Dutch

colonial towns

were established

in the south and southwest, including Stellenbosch, Tulbagh, Graaff-Reinet, and Swellendam.

Once British rule began at the start of the 19th century, new towns were created more rapidly,

New towns such as Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, Beaufort West, and Durban were created more rapidly with the advent of British rule at the start of the 19th century. The Great Trek of

dissatisfied

Dutch farmers and townspeople

away from British rule

, which commenced during the 1830s, led to a range of new, mainly small urban centres in the interior focused on church and government:

such places included

Winburg, Pietermaritzburg, Potchefstroom, Bloemfontein, Lydenburg (now Mashishing), and Pretoria. These towns were laid out with large lots and a grid pattern, features that generally survive today.

Until the 1860s all South African towns were

very

small; the largest, Cape Town, had a population of

less

fewer than 40,000 in 1865. Urbanization accelerated rapidly from the 1870s as railway building, mining, and economic expansion proceeded.

The

Although the population of the Cape Town metropolitan area reached 130,000 by the turn of the 20th century,

by which time Johannesburg (

Johannesburg, which was established in 1886

)

, had already surpassed

its

it in size. Continued rapid growth

during

since the early 20th century has created four major urban concentrations. Of these, by far the largest is the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging complex

(often referred to as the “PWV” area),

; centred on Johannesburg,

radiating

it radiates about 45 miles (70 km) in each direction

,

and is now mostly

falling into

in Gauteng province.

The Durban area forms the second largest urban region, followed by that centred on Cape Town

Other urban concentrations are centred on Durban, Cape Town, and the Port Elizabeth–Uitenhage area

in Eastern province, the smallest of the major industrial centres

. The

major

main centres in these metropolitan areas offer the same full range of services

that

found in cities of their size

offer

in other countries

, but

; but, despite the end of legal segregation, all show great disparities of income and access to urban services between the wealthiest, predominantly white

,

areas and the poorest, exclusively black

,

districts.

Outside these major metropolitan areas, most South African towns are small and serve either mining communities or surrounding rural areas. Between these extremes are several cities with rapidly growing populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands: the port of East London, the

KwaZulu/Natal capital of Ulundi, the

Free State capital

of

Bloemfontein, newer industrial centres such as Witbank in Mpumalanga, and a few rural service centres that have

recently

become regional administrative and educational centres

and grown very rapidly

, such as Mafikeng, Nelspruit, and

Pietersburg

Polokwane.

South African cities have shown a measure of racial segregation in residence since their colonial foundation.

The

Settler-founded towns contained a majority of white inhabitants until the discovery of diamonds and gold in the late 19th century initiated the industrial revolution. In the early years of the 20th century

saw the creation of

, segregated public-housing areas were created when urban populations became largely black. Various government measures

introduced from

beginning in the 1920s

on

gave authorities

powers

the power to segregate

Africans

blacks and others; during the 1930s and ’40s

, attempts were made to extend

such provisions were extended to

segregate

Coloureds (persons of mixed race) and Indians

from whites as well

(South Asians), culminating in the Group Areas Act of 1950. Under its provisions, South African cities acquired their characteristic form

, with

: white residential areas, generally situated in more-favourable localities (environmentally pleasing or close to the city centre),

occupying

occupied most of the urban space

. Other

, while other sectors and peripheral localities were set aside for

Coloureds, Indians, and Africans

nonwhites; many of these latter areas were initially devoted to segregated public-housing estates called “townships.”

During recent years a

A degree of racial housing integration

of residence has

occurred in some cities

; for example,

in the 1980s, and such high-density residential areas

such

as Hillbrow in Johannesburg became effectively integrated despite the Group Areas Act.

In general, however, and notwithstanding the repeal in 1991 of that act and related legislation,

The act was repealed in 1991, but the racially defined settlement patterns in the towns and townships persist.

The people

Ethnic distribution

Government-determined racial and ethnic classification, embodied in the Population Registration Act in effect from 1950 to 1991, was crucial in determining the status of South Africans in all areas of life. The act divided South Africans at birth into four racial categories—Black, White, Coloured, and Asian—though these classifications were largely arbitrary, based on considerations such as family background and cultural acceptance as well as on appearance.

The original Khoikhoi and San peoples of South Africa scarcely exist as distinct groups inside the country today. Other African peoples entered the country several hundred and even thousands of years ago, and their descendants today constitute about three-fourths of South Africa’s population. The African population is heterogeneous, composed mainly of four linguistic groups. The largest is the Nguni, including various Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa, and Zulu peoples, who constitute more than half the African population of the country and form the majority in many eastern and coastal regions. The second largest is Sotho-Tswana, which includes numerous Sotho, Pedi, and Tswana peoples and forms a majority in many Highveld areas. The last two are the Tsonga, or Shangaan, concentrated in Northern and Mpumalanga provinces, and the Venda, concentrated in Northern province.

White South Africans consist of two main language groups. More than half of them are Afrikaans speakers, the descendants of mostly Dutch, French, and German settlers. Most of the remainder are English-speaking, mainly the descendants of British colonists, with a sizable minority of Portuguese origin and smaller groups of Italians and others. Demographic trends

The South African population rose steadily over the last quarter of the 20th century, increasing from some 27 million in 1985 to more than 41 million by 1996. By the late 1990s, however, the incidence of AIDS began to rise, limiting population growth. In the early 21st century, South Africa’s birth rate was similar to the world average, but, largely because of AIDS, the country’s death rate was about twice as high as the world average. Average life expectancy in South Africa was similar to or higher than that of most Southern African countries but much lower than the world average.

Immigration from Europe exceeded 20,000 people per year during the late 1960s and early ’70s, but in the late ’70s and ’80s the number of whites leaving South Africa tended to exceed the new arrivals. The white population is highly urbanized.

The population formerly classified as Coloured is composed of mixed-race descendants of Africans, Indians and other Asians, and Europeans. Several distinct ethnic groups can be identified, such as the Malays, largely descended from Islāmic slaves brought from Indonesia under Dutch rule, and the Griquas, who can trace their origins to Khoikhoi communities beyond the border of the Cape Colony in earlier centuries. Varying in skin colour, most of this population speaks Afrikaans or, to a lesser extent, English and in many respects cannot be distinguished culturally from the white population. Those formerly classified as Coloured are concentrated in the western half of the country, particularly in Western and Northern Cape and the westernmost parts of Eastern Cape province, where they form a majority in most districts.

South Africans of Indian descent, classified under apartheid as Asian, form a large minority, which originated with immigrant traders and indentured workers in the second half of the 19th century. Today the large majority live in KwaZulu/Natal and to a lesser extent in Gauteng, Northern, and Mpumalanga. Almost all Indian South Africans live in urban areas. Small communities of other ethnic Asians, including Chinese, live in some of the cities.

Religion

The largest category of religious affiliation is to independent African Christian churches, which vary in size from small groups to millions of members. The largest established Christian denominations, drawing members from all ethnic groups, are the Methodist, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Dutch Reformed churches. The other major religions are Hinduism, among the majority of Indians; Islām, among many Indians and Malays; and Judaism, among a significant minority of the white population.

The economy

In the early 21st century, South Africa saw an increase in the number of immigrants and refugees from other African countries fleeing political persecution or seeking greater economic prospects, especially from neighbouring Zimbabwe.

Economy

The economy of South Africa was revolutionized in the late 19th century when diamonds and gold were discovered there. Extensive investment from foreign capital followed. In the years since World War II, South Africa has the country has established a well-developed manufacturing base, and it has experienced highly variable growth rates, including some years when its growth rate was among the highest in the world. Its gross domestic product (GDP) is the largest in Africa. Foreign capital has been extensively invested in South Africa, but the level of foreign investment declined in the period of slower growth and antiapartheid activity in the late 1970s and ’80s. South Africa’s economy long was dependent on agriculture and mining and on the export of commodities and import of manufactured goods. Since World War II the country has built a well-developed manufacturing base, though it continues to import manufactured goods and remains dependent on the export of primary products. The high value of the precious metals that form the core of South Africa’s mineral exports has enabled the country to maintain a high and stable positive balance of trade. The Since the late 1970s, however, South Africa has had continuing economic problems, initially because its apartheid policies led many countries to withhold foreign investment and to impose increasingly severe trade sanctions against it.

South Africa’s economy did not immediately rebound in the early 1990s while apartheid was being dismantled, as investors waited to see what would happen. Only after democratic elections in 1994 did significant investment return. Postapartheid South Africa was then faced with the problem of integrating the previously disenfranchised and oppressed majority into the economy. In 1996 the government created a five-year plan—Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR)—that focused on privatization and the removal of exchange controls. GEAR was only moderately successful in achieving some of its goals but was hailed by some as laying an important foundation for future economic progress. The government also implemented new laws and programs designed to improve the economic situation of the marginalized majority. One such strategy, called Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), focused on increasing the number of employment opportunities for people formerly classified under apartheid as black, Coloured, or Indian, improving their work skills, and enhancing their income-earning potential. The concept of BEE was further defined and expanded by the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) Act of 2003 (promulgated in 2004), which addressed gender and social inequality as well as racial inequality.

The South African economy is essentially based on private enterprise, but the state participates in many ways. Through the Industrial Development Corporation, it the apartheid-era government set up and has controlled several a wide array of public corporations, including the South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation, which produces oil from coal and which was subsequently privatized. ISCOR, the major iron and steel producer, was also formerly controlled by the government; the many relating to industrial infrastructure. Two such corporations—one, the country’s primary producer of iron and steel; the other, an important producer of oil from coal—were privatized in the 1980s. The Electrical Supply Commission (ESKOM), the major electricity utility, still is. The government also owns the railways, the national airline, harbour facilities, fuel pipelines, and telecommunications. By means of a range of official and quasi-governmental bodies, the government encourages the development of industry, consultations on tariff protection, and export promotion and research; it also maintains a bureau of standards. The Development Bank of Southern Africa is a quasi-governmental company created to promote development projects, while the South African Housing Trust is a joint venture between the government and the private sector intended to provide low-cost housing.Central government taxation consists primarily of income taxes on individuals and businesses and a value-added tax on transactions. Provincial governments depend mainly on transfer payments from the central government, while property taxes and levies on businesses provide the main support for local governmentsremains government-controlled, but several entities that formerly were branches of government have been converted to public corporations, including Transnet, which runs the railways and harbours. In the 1990s the government partially privatized airlines and telecommunications, and, despite fierce opposition from trade unions, official economic policy has been to continue partially or completely privatizing many public enterprises.

Economic policy has been aimed primarily at sustaining economic growth and achieving a measure of industrial self-sufficiency. Since the early 1970s, high High rates of inflation and declining investment, however, have complicated the economic situation. Trade sanctions imposed by many countries in response to the government’s apartheid policies exacerbated these problems, but they continued even after the end of apartheid and sanctions. Dependence on imports renewed inflationary pressure while limiting the government’s ability to meet pressing social demands. Economic policy is became the subject of ongoing debate between those favouring market forces and the advocates of substantial state intervention, and there is debate between those favouring ; still others favoured an export-led or inward-looking industrial policy.

Until the early 1970s the labour movement in South Africa was dominated by white trade unions, which supported the reservation of the highest-skilled jobs for whites only. With a wave of strikes in 1973–74, a militant black trade union movement emerged, and numerous strike waves followed later. The most important trade union federation is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a nonracial but mainly black body that includes the country’s largest unions, among them the National Union of Mineworkers. Other federations include the National Council of Trade Unions and the mainly white Federation of South African Labour.

Resources

Diamonds and gold are the best-known and, together with coal, historically the most important minerals, but there are many others of importance, including iron ore, platinum, manganese, chromium, copper, uranium, silver, beryllium, and titanium. No commercially exploitable deposits of oil have been found, but natural gas in moderate quantities exists off the southern coast, and oil is made from coal at two large plants in the northern Free State and Mpumalanga Highveld.

Known coal deposits are large, mostly at easily mined depths beneath the Mpumalanga and northern Free State Highveld. South Africa has vast deposits of platinum-group and chromium minerals, located mainly in the Bushveld north of Pretoria. There are major deposits of iron ore and manganese, particularly in Northern Cape; titanium-bearing sands are common on the eastern seaboard.

Historically, the stated policy of the African National Congress (ANC), which took power in 1994, was that it would seek a state-led mixed economy based on nationalized mining and financial enterprises; since taking leadership of the government, it has in fact pursued privatization of a substantial number of formerly state-owned enterprises. The government faces competing demands—to improve the living conditions of the impoverished black population while also addressing the demands for economic liberalization from business interests and Western governments. It has chosen to make maintaining business confidence and boosting investment the core element of its economic policy.

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing

Agriculture is of major importance to South Africa. It produces a significant portion of exports and contributes greatly to the domestic economy, especially as an employer, but though land and water resources are generally poor. There are areas of exception, however, such as the Arable land constitutes only slightly more than one-tenth of the country’s surface area, with well-watered, fertile soils of existing primarily in the Western Cape river valleys , and on the KwaZulu/-Natal coast, and the . The Highveld of Mpumalanga and Free State , which offer good historically has offered adequate conditions for extensive cereal cultivation . There are also some dry areas in which irrigation allows the soils to become productivebased on substantial government extension services and subsidies to white farm owners. Some dry areas, such as in the Fish River valley of Eastern Cape province.

Timber resources are minimal, but the small percentage of land under indigenous forest has been supplemented by substantial areas under plantation in the wetter parts of the east and southeast. Hydroelectric potential is limited, though the government has developed projects on a number of rivers; more significant are the projects to import electricity from stations on the Zambezi at Cahora Bassa, Mozambique, and on rivers in the Lesotho Highlands.

Agriculture, forestry, and fishing

Agriculture produces a small percentage of the GDP but contributes, in most years, a substantial proportion of exports. Among the major products , have become productive through the use of irrigation. Further irrigation has been provided by the ongoing Orange River Project, which upon completion should add about another three-tenths to the total amount of land in production.

Among the major crops are corn (maize), wheat, cane sugarsugarcane, millet and sorghum, peanuts (groundnuts), citrus and other fruits, grapes, tobacco, wool, and meatand tobacco. Sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs are raised for food and other products; dairy (wool and meat (beef, lamb and mutton, and goat) are important. Dairy (including butter and cheese) and egg production are also importantsignificant, particularly around the major urban centres.A thriving horticultural market supplies fresh cut flowers to the European market via air freight.

Timber resources are minimal, but the small amount of forested land has been supplemented by substantial areas under plantation in the wetter parts of the east and southeast. The forest industry supplies mining timber, pulpwood for paper and board mills, and building timbers mostly sufficient for a construction industry that primarily uses brick, concrete, and steel. Fishing areas lie mainly off the western and southern coasts. The principal shoal-fishing products catches are pilchard and maasbanker, while offshore trawling produces brings in kingklip, Agulha Agulhas sole, Cape hake, and kabeljou, among others.The forest industry supplies mining timber, pulpwood to paper and board mills, and building timbers mostly sufficient for a construction industry that builds primarily in brick, concrete, and steel.

IndustryResources and power

South Africa is rich in a variety of minerals. In addition to diamonds and gold, the country also contains reserves of iron ore, platinum, manganese, chromium, copper, uranium, silver, beryllium, and titanium. No commercially exploitable deposits of petroleum have been found, but there are moderate quantities of natural gas located off the southern coast, and synthetic fuel is made from coal at two large plants in the provinces of Free State and Mpumalanga.

Although for decades manufacturing has employed more people and produced more output in terms of percentage of the GDP than has mininga greater proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) than mining has, the mining sector continues to form the core of the South African economy as mining-centred holding companies invest in other economic activity. Gold remains the most important mineral—South Africa produces almost one-third of is the world’s gold—and largest producer—and reserves are large; however, though production is slowly declining, and prices have not recovered never equaled their spectacular increases highs of the early 1970s. Gold accounts for more than half of mineral sales; about one-quarter of the gold recovered now comes from gold mine residuesAs a result, a number of older mines have been rendered marginal or unprofitable. Several gold mines closed in the 1990s, and thousands of mine workers lost their jobs. The main goldfields centred historically on Johannesburg; the major areas of production now lie some distance east, west (Far West Rand), and south (northern Free State) of Johannesburg, centred on towns such as Evander, Carletonville, and Welkom, respectivelythe areas of Klerksdorp and Evander.

Coal is another of South Africa’s second most valuable mineral product. The largest sales of coal are products. Large known deposits lie, mostly at easily mined depths, beneath the Mpumalanga and northern Free State Highveld. Coal is produced primarily for export (to East Asia and Europe) and for the generation of electricity.

Platinum and chromium, of which South Africa is the world’s largest producer of platinum and chromium, which are produced mined at centres such as Rustenburg and Steelpoort in the northeast and are becoming increasingly significant . Gem diamond production historically was concentrated around Kimberley but economically. Vast deposits of platinum-group and chromium minerals are located mainly to the north of Pretoria. Northern Cape province contains most of the major deposits of iron ore and manganese, and titanium-bearing sands are common on the eastern seaboard. In addition, the country produces uranium, palladium, nickel, copper, antimony, vanadium, fluorspar, and limestone. Diamond mining, historically concentrated around Kimberley, now occurs in a variety of localities. South Africa is The South African diamond industry, among the world’s largestdiamond producers. Most South African diamond production is , is largely controlled by De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd.

Electricity Nearly all of South Africa’s electricity is produced thermally, almost entirely from coal. Most electric power is generated by ESKOM at huge stations in the MpumalangaHighveld. Oil Synthetic fuel derived from coal supplies a percentage small proportion of the country’s energy needs, the remainder coming from imports as does imported oil refined at the ports or piped to a major inland refinery at Sasolburg. A nuclear power plant at Duinefonte has operated since 1984. Hydroelectric potential is limited, though there are government-developed projects on a number of rivers; more significant are the projects to import electricity from stations on the Zambezi River at Cahora Bassa, Mozam., and on rivers in the Lesotho Highlands. South Africa exports electricity to various Southern African countries.

Manufacturing

The major manufacturing sectors are in food processing , and the production of textiles, metals, and chemicals. Agriculture and fisheries provide the basis for substantial activity in meat, fish, and fruit canning, the sugar industryrefining, and other processing; more than half the these products are exported. A large and complex chemical industry has developed from early beginnings in the manufacture of explosives for use in mining. A coal-based petrochemical industry produces a wide range of plastics, resins, and industrial chemicals. The metal industry, centred in Gauteng, draws much of its raw material from ISCOR, the iron and steel producer. Other firms also supply the steel, heavy engineering, and machinery industriesproducing firms located in the area. Imported materials supply aluminum manufacturers located mainly in KwaZulu/-Natal. Manufacturing extends to encompasses automobiles, shipbuildingships, building materials, electronics, and many other sectorsproducts, notably armaments, though . Though the weapons industry has begun to diversify into nonmilitary production, the postapartheid government has also promoted a controversial export trade in arms, after military sanctions were lifted.

Manufacturing has been highly dependent depended heavily on foreign capital; it expanded rapidly in the 1960s and early ’70s but grew relatively slowly or even contracted during the ’80s. As mining gradually declines, manufacturing and its need for foreign capital take on even greater importance for national development. About one-fourth of manufacturing output is exported.

Finance

South Africa has a well-developed financial system. The , centred on the South African Reserve Bank, which is the sole note- issuing authority for the rand, the national currency. It formulates and implements monetary policy and manages foreign-exchange transactions. There are more than 50 many registered banking institutions, about 15 a number of which concentrate on commercial banking. There are more than a dozen merchant , as well as merchant, savings, investment, and discount banksand a number of permanent building societies. The Land Bank is an important specialist state institution, lending to agriculture but historically only to white farmers. One such bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, is a quasi-governmental company created to promote development projects. Private pension and provident funds and more than 90 two dozen insurance companies play significant roles in the financial sector. There is an An active capital market exists, organized around the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Trade

Dependence Because of its dependence on foreign tradeis relatively high, and the South African Africa’s economy is thus sensitive to global economic conditions. Precious metals and base metals have been leading exports; agricultural goods and military equipment also play an important role. South Africa exports military equipment worldwide, particularly to the Middle East. The country’s major imports are oilchemicals, machinerychemical products, electrical equipment, and transportation equipment. A number of imports, most importantly oil, have been classified by the government as “strategic materials.” Data for these are not available, making it difficult to assess the exact percentages of various import categories. and motor vehicles. South Africa’s main trading partners are the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Japan. These five countries account for the bulk of the country’s trade. However, South Africa’s trading partners have diversified; Taiwan, several Latin-American countries, other African countries, and a number of Asian economies such as Singapore, Malaysia, and India account for an increasing proportion of South Africa’s international trade.

Transportation

Because South African rivers are generally unsuitable for navigation, Regional trade in Southern Africa is increasingly important, especially through the Southern African Development Community. Since the end of apartheid, South African companies have sought to expand investment in other African countries, particularly in mining and commercial activity.

Services

Tourism is becoming increasingly important to South Africa’s economy. While the majority of tourists come from African countries, an increasing number of arrivals are from Europe and the Americas. There are many tourist attractions, notably the national and transnational parks. Travel across South Africa’s borders into other African countries is being eased. Among the most popular tourist attractions are the wine regions in Western Cape province, Table Mountain, Robben Island (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1999; the location of an infamous prison), and historic sites such as the former diamond mine in Kimberley, the Vredefort Dome (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005; the world’s oldest and largest meteorite impact site), and the Mapungubwe settlement area (designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2003; the ruins of an important kingdom of the Iron Age). Ecotourism is increasing in popularity, as is village tourism, in which visitors can learn about traditional rural culture.

Labour and taxation

Until the early 1970s the labour movement in South Africa was dominated by white trade unions, which held that the highest-skilled jobs should be reserved for whites only. A militant black trade union movement emerged, beginning with a wave of strikes in 1973–74, and numerous strikes followed. The most important trade union federation is the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which maintains a formal political alliance with the ANC and is a nonracial but mainly black body that includes the country’s largest unions, among them the National Union of Mineworkers. Other federations include the black consciousness-rooted National Council of Trade Unions and the mainly white Federation of South African Labour.

Central government taxation consists primarily of income taxes on individuals and businesses and a value-added tax on transactions. Provincial governments depend mainly on transfer payments from the central government, while property taxes and levies on businesses provide the main support for local governments.

Transportation and telecommunications

South Africa contains no navigable rivers; coastal shipping provides the only water transport. Africa’s most intense The country’s network of roads and railways supplies most railways—the most extensive in Africa—handles most of the transportation demand, supplemented by air travel.

Railways and roads

The railway system

is almost entirely owned and operated by the state; it

, which serves all the major cities, most smaller towns, and many rural areas, is almost entirely owned and operated through the Transnet public corporation, although parts of Transnet are gradually being privatized. A narrow gauge of 3 feet 6 inches (

1,067 millimetres

107 cm) was adopted in the 1870s to lower the cost of construction in mountainous terrain. More than

three

four-

fourths

fifths of the network of

14

more than 19,000 miles (31,000 km) of track is electrified, and

over four-fifths of all traffic is hauled by electric locomotives. More than one-fourth of goods transported consists of coal, other minerals account for one-third, and agricultural products for one-eighth

the system has been computerized since 1980. Coal and iron ore, among other products, are transported on these lines. Long-distance passenger services have declined, but many commuters use train services in all the major urban centres. The luxurious Blue Train—which primarily runs the 1,000 miles (1,600 km) between Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town—and the surviving steam-operated services

; about two-fifths of the roads are paved. Most towns are connected by

high-standard

two-lane highways; multilane freeway systems extend around the four major urban areas, but, over long distances, only Johannesburg and Durban are connected by

four-lane highway. Almost all roads are provided and regulated by

such a highway. Most of the responsibility for maintaining and regulating roads falls to the different levels of government, but some long-distance roads have been transferred to the private sector

, and tolls are charged on them.Inland air transport

and transformed into toll roads. In the 1990s the government instigated significant public-private initiatives to develop a transport corridor from Gauteng across Mpumalanga to Maputo in Mozambique and other corridors in major urban areas.

Air transport and shipping

Inland air services, both passenger and freight, are operated by the state-owned South African Airways and by an increasing number of private competitors. Air services connect all major cities. South African Airways and many foreign carriers fly between South Africa and all neighbouring countries; international service extends

to six continents

worldwide. The international airport near Johannesburg is the main hub of

South African

the country’s air transport both domestically and internationally, while the airports at Cape Town and Durban play increasingly important roles as international destinations.

All South African ports are owned and operated by

the government

South African Ports Operations and National Ports Authority, subsidiaries of Transnet. Durban, which serves most of KwaZulu

/

-Natal, Mpumalanga, and northern Free State, is the major port. Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and East London (the only river port in South Africa) handle mixed traffic for their immediate hinterlands and more-distant locations. All these ports handle goods traveling to and from other African countries, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, and

Congo (Kinshasa)

the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Maputo,

in Mozambique, which is

the port closest to Johannesburg, serves many areas of the northern provinces.

In addition, newer

Newer ports have also been developed at

Richard’s Bay

such places as Richards Bay, which handles exports of coal on the north coast of KwaZulu

/

-Natal, and in the excellent natural harbour at Saldanha Bay north of Cape Town,

mainly for exports of coal and iron ore, respectively.

Administration and social conditions

National governmentThe republic’s original constitution, the South Africa Act of 1909, formed

from which iron ore is exported.

Telecommunications

Telecommunications systems are rather well developed, but their distribution is highly uneven. Many areas in South Africa still do not have basic telephone service. A program has been under way since the mid-1990s to vastly increase the number of telephone lines. Several cell phone companies provide coverage to many parts of the country. Internet connections exist in the major cities, and South Africa has one of the highest degrees of Internet connectivity in Africa. Telkom, the state telecommunications company, was partially privatized at the beginning of the 21st century.

Government and society

Constitutional framework

South Africa’s original constitution, the British Parliament’s South Africa Act of 1909, united two former British colonies, the Cape of Good Hope and Natal, with two former Boer (Dutch) republics, the Transvaal and Orange Free State. The new Union of South Africa was based on a parliamentary system with the British monarch as head of state. The constitution was revised by the Republic of South Africa Constitution Act of 1961 , which transformed South Africa the country from a dominion within the British Commonwealth to into an independent republic.

South Africa’s political development has been was shaped by its colonial past and the implementation of apartheid policies by the white minority, the ensuing . After widespread protest and social unrest, and the adoption in 1993 of a new nonracial interim constitution that was adopted in 1993 and took effect in 1994. A new, permanent constitution, mandated by the interim document and drafted by Parliament in 1996, entered force took effect in 1997.

Government under apartheid

Until 1994 the three officially designated nonwhite groups—Africans, Coloureds (those of mixed race), and Asians (primarily Indians)—were systematically deprived of political participation in the conduct of national and provincial affairs. With few exceptions, the nonwhite population was prohibited from voting. In 1959 African representation in Parliament, which had been provided by three elected whites, was abolished. The 1984 constitution extended the franchise to Coloureds and Asians, although it introduced a distinction between “general affairs” (those pertaining to all racial groups) and “own affairs” (those particular to a racial group) and established separate legislative chambers for whites, Coloureds, and Asians. Africans continued to be excluded from the national government.

The constitutionThe constitution

Constitutions through the 1980s

The 1909 South Africa Act served as the country’s constitution until 1961. When South Africa officially became a republic in 1961, a constitution was finally written. In addition to providing for the already established positions of president and prime minister, the constitution gave Coloureds and Asians some voting rights. A new constitution was promulgated in 1984. The bicameral parliament was replaced by a tricameral system that created a House of Assembly for whites, a House of Representatives for Coloureds, and a House of Delegates for Indians. The black majority was given few political rights in either constitution.

The 1996 constitution

The 1996 constitution’s preamble points to the injustices of South Africa’s past

in its preamble

and defines the republic as a sovereign democratic state founded on the principles of human dignity, nonracialism and nonsexism, and the achievement of equality and advancement of human rights and freedoms. Another of

its

the guiding principles, that of “cooperative government,” emphasizes the distinctiveness, interdependence, and

interelationship

interrelationship of the national, provincial, and local spheres of government. The constitution

calls for a

established the bicameral national Parliament. The lower house, or National Assembly, comprises 350 to 400 members who are directly elected to a five-year term through proportional representation. The National Council of Provinces, which replaced the Senate as the upper house, is made up of 10-member delegations (each with six permanent and four special members, including the provincial premier) chosen by each of the provincial assemblies. For most votes each delegation casts a single vote. The president, elected from among the members of the National Assembly by that body, is the head of state

and

; as the

head of the

national executive, the president presides over a cabinet that includes a deputy president and a member whom the president designates as the “leader of government business” in the assembly.

All citizens over 18 years of age have the right to vote.

Provincial, regional, and local governmentThe South Africa Act of 1909 created a unitary state in which Local government

Provincial government

Local government was established in 1909 when the four former colonies became provinces. Each was governed by a white-elected provincial council with limited legislative powers. The administrator of each province was appointed by the central government and presided over an executive committee representing the majority party in the council.

The provincial

Provincial councils were abolished in 1986, and the executive committees, appointed by the president, became the

executive

administrative arms of the state in each province. By the late 1980s a small number of

Africans

blacks, Coloureds, and Indians had been appointed to them.

The constitution, which abolished the provinces in this form and replaced them with nine new provinces,

In 1994 the four original provinces of South Africa (Cape of Good Hope, Orange Free State, Transvaal, and Natal) and the four former independent homelands (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei) were reorganized into nine provinces: Western Cape, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape, North-West, Free State, Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (now Gauteng), Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga), Northern (now Limpopo), and KwaZulu-Natal. The constitution provides for the election of provincial legislatures comprising 30 to 80 members elected to five-year terms through proportional representation. Each legislature elects a premier, who then appoints a provincial executive council of up to 10 members. The provincial legislatures have the authority to legislate in a range of matters specified in the constitution, including education, environment, health, housing, police, and transport, although complex provisions give the central government a degree of concurrent power. South Africa thus has a weak federal system.

In 1959 the government began designating African “homelands”; each was allocated territory, usually fragmented, and in each homeland (also called “Bantustan,” “national state,” or “self-governing territory”) a regional government was created. Apartheid policy intended that all these units should evolve into independent states, and by 1981 four of them had done so, though their “independence” was recognized by no government outside South Africa. The homelands played an active role in the constitutional negotiations of the early 1990s; their governments formally ceased to exist and were absorbed into the new provincial governments when the interim constitution took effect in April 1994. The six provinces whose territory includes the former homelands integrated those defunct administrations into the new provincial administrations.

Municipal government

Urban municipal government has

existed

developed unevenly in South Africa since the early 19th century

but has been unevenly developed. Local councils were elected by white voters only, with rare exceptions; Coloureds and Asians were allowed only advisory powers. In 1990 local government entered a phase of transition, and new arrangements came under negotiation. Under the 1996 constitution

. In the 20th century, intensified urban segregation was accompanied by the creation of councils that advised the administrators appointed by white governments to run black, Coloured, and Asian “locations” and “townships.” In most rural areas, white governments tried to incorporate indigenous hereditary leaders (“chiefs”) of local communities as the front line for governing blacks, although the Cape administration also set up a parallel system of appointed “headmen.”

Under the 1996 constitution, local government is predicated on

the

a division of the entire country into municipalities. Executive and legislative authority is vested in municipal councils, some of which share authority with other municipalities. Chiefs

(Zulu: amaKhosi; Sotho: Makgosi) were once the hereditary leaders of the various clans or tribes of African people in what is now South Africa. Under colonial rule attempts were made to rule indirectly through chiefs, and under apartheid chiefs were incorporated into the government, their appointments being dependent on the governing authorities. Chiefs generally work with traditional councils (known under apartheid as “tribal authorities”).

Political parties

The all-white National Party (NP) was the dominant parliamentary party from the time it came to power in 1948 until 1994. Prior to 1990 its programs emphasized white South African nationalism, anticommunism, and the implementation of apartheid. The largest black political organization has long been the African National Congress (ANC), formed in 1912 but banned in 1960. The Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP, or Inkatha), founded in the mid-1970s, represents many Zulu people.

The ANC and the NP dominated the constitutional negotiations that began after the legalization of the ANC in 1990 and included about two dozen other groups. In the 1994 elections, the ANC took more than 60 percent of the vote, the NP about 20 percent, and Inkatha about 10 percent. The ANC won majorities in seven of the nine provinces; the NP in one, Western Cape; and Inkatha won a majority in KwaZulu/Natal. Racially defined voting patterns began to dissolve. The other parties receiving significant support were the Freedom Front (a right-wing white party), the Democratic Party (the heir to a long liberal tradition in white politics), and the Pan-Africanist Congress, a small group that broke away from the ANC in 1959. The South African Communist Party, a longtime ally of the ANC in the fight against apartheid, entered candidates on the ANC’s lists, as did the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) and the trade union federation COSATU.

remain important in rural governance. They generally work with appointed councils regarded by their supporters as traditional. Efforts by other blacks to reform and democratize rural administration and reduce the power of chiefs have become some of the most violently contentious issues in postapartheid politics.

Justice

The common law of the republic is based on Roman-Dutch law, the uncodified law of the The Netherlands having been retained after the Cape’s cession to the United Kingdom in 18141815. The judiciary comprises the Constitutional Court (with powers to decide on the constitutionality of legislative and administrative actions, particularly with respect to the bill of rights), the Supreme Court of Appeal (the highest court of appeal except in constitutional matters), the High Courts, and Magistrate’s Courts. Parliament may create additional courts but only with status equal to that of the High and Magistrate’s Courts. The Supreme Court is headed by a chief justice, who is appointed by the state president, as are the deputy chief justice and the chief justice and deputy chief justice of the Constitutional Court. Other judges are appointed by the president with the advisement advice of the Judicial Service Commission.

Traditional authorities exercise some powers in relation to customary law, which derives from indigenous African practice codified in some areas (such as KwaZulu/-Natal) by colonial rulers. Customary law continues to be recognized in various ways. For example, marriage in South Africa takes place either under customary law or under statute law, with profound implications for the legal status of African women married under customary law. Most civil and criminal litigation is a matter for the Magistrate’s Courts.

Armed forces and securityIn 1994 the armed forces

entered a period of transitionPolitical process

All citizens 18 years of age and older have the right to vote. Prior to universal suffrage, introduced in 1994, blacks, Coloureds, and Asians (primarily Indians) were systematically deprived of political participation in the conduct of national and provincial affairs, with few exceptions. In the Cape Colony and, later, Cape of Good Hope province, a property-qualified franchise once allowed a minority of better-off Coloureds and blacks to vote (rights eventually abolished under apartheid). Black representation in Parliament—provided by a small number of elected white representatives—was abolished in 1959, on the theory that blacks would eventually find their political rights as citizens of the “homelands” that would eventually become independent. Coloureds, who had been on a common voting roll with whites, were forced into separate representation in Parliament in 1956, and that arrangement was abolished altogether in 1968.

The 1984 constitution extended the franchise to Coloureds and Asians in segregated houses of Parliament, but the substance of power in most matters, particularly over the general policy of apartheid, remained with the house representing whites. Blacks continued to be excluded from the national government.

White women gained the right to vote in 1930; other women did not gain that right until universal suffrage was introduced in 1994. Women have since made strides in attaining important government positions. At the beginning of the 21st century, they made up about one-third of the National Assembly. In 2005, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka was appointed deputy president—the first woman named to that position.

The major political party is the African National Congress (ANC; founded 1912). Banned from 1960 until 1990, the ANC changed from a national liberation organization to a political party after it won a majority at national democratic elections held in 1994. Other parties with significant support are the Inkatha Freedom Party (a largely Zulu organization), the Freedom Front (a right-wing white party), the Democratic Party (the heir to a long liberal tradition in white politics), and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC; a group that broke away from the ANC in 1959). The South African Communist Party, a longtime ally of the ANC in the fight against apartheid, entered candidates for the 1994 election on the ANC’s lists, as did the South African National Civic Organization and the trade union federation COSATU.

Another party that played a significant role in South Africa’s history was the National Party (NP), which ruled the country from 1948 to 1994. Founded in 1914 and supported by both Afrikaners and English-speaking white South Africans, the NP was long dedicated to policies of white supremacy and developed the apartheid system. By the early 1990s the NP, bowing to international pressure, had moved toward sharing power with the country’s black majority and was later defeated in 1994 in the country’s first multiracial elections. The party sought to recast its image by changing its name to the New National Party in December 1998, and it allied itself with the Democratic Party and the Federal Alliance in 2000 in an attempt to gain more political power. After several years of declining popularity, the party’s federal council voted to disband the party in 2005.

Security

South Africa has a large, well-equipped army, by far the largest contingent of the country’s armed forces. The navy has a small fleet consisting of frigates, submarines, minesweepers, small strike craft, and auxiliary vessels. The air force’s craft include fighter-bombers, interceptor fighters, helicopters, and reconnaissance, transport, and training aircraft.

The armed forces entered a period of transition in 1994. South Africa’s military traditionally had been white, with a small standing force and a large reserve component. However, from the 1970s an increasing number of black troops were recruited. Compulsory military service, formerly for white males only, ended in 1994. Integration Guerrillas of forces established as part of the antiapartheid struggle brought change to the military as the guerrillas of the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), were and of the PAC’s military have been incorporated into the a renamed South African army.The navy has a small fleet consisting of frigates, submarines, minesweepers, small strike craft, and auxiliary vessels. The air force’s aircraft include fighter bombers, interceptor fighters, helicopters, and reconnaissance, transport, and training aircraftNational Defence Force. This integration has not been entirely smooth: ex-guerrillas have been perceived by many military professionals as lacking training and discipline, while the old-line white noncommissioned and commissioned officer corps has been perceived by some black soldiers as riddled with racism. A number of top officers under the old government were forced out in the 1990s as various apartheid-era abuses came to light, although concerns prior to the 1994 elections of possible rebellion by conservative military and police leaders have diminished.

During the apartheid period the South African government, through a network of private and government-controlled corporations led by the state-owned Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor), developed a variety of new weapons systems, mostly in order to overcome the effects of the international arms embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council in 1977. Nuclear weapons were developed in great secrecy—six atomic bombs were built during the 1970s and ’80s—but the nuclear weapons program was terminated in 1989, and the bombs were dismantled the following year by the NP government as the prospect of a black-led government became increasingly likely.

The regular police are organized nationally and comprise regulars as well as reservists. There have been about equal numbers of whites and nonwhites. The police bear the responsibility of , reflecting a disproportionately high number of whites. Police responsibility for maintaining internal security ; this brought them into sharp conflict with antiapartheid demonstrators during the 1970s and ’80s. Freed of the The specialist security police gained power within the force during that time, while thousands of poorly trained and poorly disciplined auxiliary police were recruited. As political control increasingly took precedence over basic policing, black communities were often treated as enemies rather than as citizens to be protected. The police were granted immunity and extrajudicial powers under the states of emergency first declared in 1983, and their actions were widely seen as abusive, contributing to the growth of international pressure on South Africa’s government. Once the police had been freed of the burden of enforcing apartheid, they faced the police face the challenge of forging better relationships with communities in the fight against rising crime levels.

In the late 1970s the daily average prison population was almost 100,000, one of the highest rates in the world. Of these, the majority were imprisonments imprisoned for statutory offenses against the so-called pass laws, repealed in 1986, which restricted the right of Africans blacks to live and work in white areas and which did not apply to other racial groups. Since then the Under the states of emergency declared at periods of peak conflict in the 1980s, as many as 50,000 persons were detained without charge or trial. The proportion of the population in prison has then declined, as the ending of the state of emergency in 1990 and the process of negotiating many detainees being released in 1990 with the end of a state of emergency; negotiations for a new constitution also led to the release of many political prisoners. An amnesty policy was instituted, covering politically inspired offenses committed on by both sides whites and nonwhites during the closing years of the struggle against apartheid.

Education

Under apartheid, general education issues, such as the establishment of educational standards, were made the responsibility of the Department of National Education, headed by a member of the cabinet. Each of the chambers of Parliament, through the creation of three separate Departments of Education and Culture, was made responsible for providing education to its own racial group. African education at all levels was placed under the administration of the Department of Education and Training (formerly the Department of Bantu Education). The 10 national states were each given their own departments of education. The different departments of education—segregated by racial category—ran school systems that varied greatly in standards and facilities. Schools run by white education departments had the best resources in the public school system. From 1990 some of these schools began to admit black pupils according to a variety of limited models of change. Since the 1993 constitution outlaws discrimination on grounds of race, schools are now compelled to admit all applicants, but capacity limitations and fees generally have kept Africans out of historically white public schools. Private schools, many of which offer superior educational programs, remain largely inaccessible to Africans because of the high cost.

The great challenge facing the provincial departments of education is to repair the decimated system of African education inherited from the apartheid years. The majority of pupils are in schools formerly run by the old “homeland” governments; these schools were characterized by poorly trained teachers, a corrupt and mismanaged bureaucracy, and a chaotic learning environment. Some schools became centres of protest and rebellion, and students were often absent for long periods because of boycotts. Many African schools were severely overcrowded and lacked basic structural necessities such as indoor plumbing, heat, and electricity; educational materials including textbooks, paper, and desks were in short supply. In 1993 a National Education and Training Forum, comprising representatives of the government and private sector, educators, parents, and students, was established to address the education crisis and develop a comprehensive reform program. Efforts were undertaken to restructure and unify South Africa’s educational system, improve teacher training, and give communities and regional authorities more control over the educational process. By the mid-1990s conditions appeared to be gradually improving. School education is compulsory for all children between 7 and 16 years of age.

The oldest and largest of the universities is the University of South Africa, which began in Cape Town but is now based in Pretoria and which offers correspondence courses in both English and Afrikaans. The oldest of the residential universities are those of Cape Town, Fort Hare, Stellenbosch, and Witwatersrand (Johannesburg); of these, only Stellenbosch is an Afrikaans-language institution, while Fort Hare was originally established to serve Africans only. Newer Afrikaans institutions are the Universities of Pretoria and Potchefstroom and Rand Afrikaans University (Johannesburg), while the University of Port Elizabeth is bilingual. The English-language institutions, including the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg and Durban) and Rhodes University, to some extent admitted black students prior to 1959, when their ability to do so was undermined by apartheid legislation that they fiercely opposed. The government then established several new institutions (the Universities of the North, Zululand, Western Cape, Durban-Westville, and Vista and the Medical University) for various black groups. The former homelands of Bophuthatswana, Transkei, and Venda also established their own universities. In 1983 official university apartheid ended, but the various institutions remain influenced by their historically dominant ethnic character. Professional and postgraduate courses are concentrated at the formerly white universities. Technically oriented education is offered by a range of technikons and technical colleges.

, provided that offenders fully revealed their actions to a public commission. The prison population began to increase significantly in the mid-1990s, and in the early 21st century South Africa’s prison population rate was the highest in Africa and among the highest in the world.

Health and welfare

While racial bias was not explicitly written into health legislation during the apartheid period, health medical care for South Africans invariably reflected the economic and political inequalities of the society, as well as the consequences of apartheid’s residential and administrative segregation and of deliberately unequal government health funding. Hospital segregation has ended, but access to health medical services remains greatly inferior in historically black areas. The health status of Africans blacks is generally low; malnutrition is perhaps the most important long-standing example, especially among rural children. There is an enormous discrepancy in infant mortality rates, which are lowest for whites and highest among rural Africansblacks. The number of South Africans infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, increased sharply during the 1990s, especially among blacks, and, at the beginning of the 21st century, South Africa ranked near the top of United Nations estimates of proportions of national populations infected with HIV. Since 1994 both the Department of National Health and the administrations of the new provinces have emphasized primary health care delivery, building in some instances on programs that farsighted medical workers instituted during the apartheid period.

In the cities and large towns a A highly sophisticated public health system exists in the cities and large towns. Some of the largest public hospitals are linked to the university medical schools, but those located in the formerly segregated African black areas tend to be overcrowded. Many of the more-expensive private hospitals are accessible only to those of with higher incomes, still predominantly whites. Most regularly employed persons enjoy a degree of private medical insurance; for many of the more affluent, , but, because a high proportion of black adults are not in formal-sector employment, reliance on insurance through employers produces a racially skewed pattern of access. By contrast, private general practitioners and specialists supply most needs . National policy development in the postapartheid period may include some form of national health insurance, at least for poorer peoplefor the most affluent.

Government provides a number of welfare measures, among them small pensions for all citizens beyond retirement age whose incomes are below a minimal level. Large numbers of elderly Africansblacks, and often their dependents, gain a minimal livelihood from this system. In the past, welfare systems were administered separately for the different defined racial groups; the value of pensions was greatest for whites, less for Indians and Coloureds (those of mixed ancestry), and lowest for Africansblacks. During the late 1980s the differentials began to be reduced, and they were eliminated under the 1993 constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of race. 1996 constitution.

The two most important features affecting social conditions in South Africa are the high unemployment rate for blacks and the wide disparity between black and white income levels. In the early 21st century, estimates of black unemployment were higher than the unemployment rates of the groups formerly classified under apartheid as Indians and Coloureds and significantly higher than the unemployment rate for whites. Blacks who were employed were generally in the lowest-paying and least-prestigious positions. This pattern partially reflected the composition of South Africa’s population, with its many migrants to industrial and urban areas, and also indicated how large the country’s informal economy had become. Substantial wage advances for miners and industrial workers since the 1970s have not been shared by the nonunionized or the underemployed. On the other hand, employment opportunities in government, the professions, and business have grown rapidly for blacks, Indians, and Coloureds, and since the early 1990s nonwhites have gradually occupied more midlevel positions.

Housing

Traditional housing varied according to ethnic group. The Nguni and the Swazi lived in dispersed households governed by chiefs, while the Sotho lived in villages and farmed on land outside the villages. The Xhosa built their houses near the tops of ridges that overlooked local rivers, and the Ndebele decorated their homesteads with colourful pictures and symbols. Zulu housing was centred around the imizi (kraal), which consisted of a fence that enclosed a number of beehive-shaped one-room houses.

Local authorities have been responsible for public housing since the 1920s; it has been segregated by race, and , although control over African black housing reverted to the central government in 1971. Much of the housing built for Coloureds and Indians was used to rehouse communities moved from one area to another under the Group Areas Act of 1950, contributing to a housing shortage. A A housing shortage existed and was somewhat addressed through a massive program of township development in African black areas began begun in the 1950s but diminished in the 1970s, also contributing to the housing problem. During the 1980s , “site-and-service” schemes emerged to provide land equipped with basic infrastructure for poorer, usually black people around the cities to build upon, but the housing crisis remained severe . In the 1990s, housing policy in the face of rapid population growth and urban migration. Housing policy since the early 1990s has emphasized the joint roles of the public and private sectors; the government launched an ambitious program of capital subsidies and loan guarantees in an effort to upgrade housing conditions and assist all citizens to acquire in acquiring title to some form of shelter.

The most important features of social conditions are the high level of unemployment and the wide disparities in wages, both of which redound to the disadvantage of black South Africans. In the mid-1990s more than one-quarter of the African population was unemployed, and those who were employed were generally in the lowest-paying and least prestigious positions. This pattern partially reflects the composition of South Africa’s population, with its many migrants to industrial and urban areas. Substantial wage advances in the mining and industrial sectors of the economy since the 1970s have not been shared by the nonunionized and the unemployed. However, access to government employment, the professions, and business has grown rapidly for Africans, Indians, and those of mixed race, and there are signs of significant change in the distribution of employment in South Africa in the 1990s as more midlevel positions are held by nonwhites.

Cultural life

Eleven languages (Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, North Sotho, South Sotho, Swazi [Swati], Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa, and Zulu) hold official status under the 1993 constitution, and a further 11 (Arabic, German, Greek, Gujarātī, Hebrew, Hindī, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdū) are to be promoted and developed. All South African languages are spoken to varying degrees in different regions; there are some areas where most residents speak neither Afrikaans nor English, but those two languages allow communication in most parts of the country. Early school education is available in all the official languages. English appears to predominate to an increasing extent in official, educational, and formal business spheres.

The artsThe many languages spoken by South Africa’s people reflect the country’s cultural diversity. The Africans have adopted a host of Western ways, but a core of African cultural traditions of language, music, and dance retains its vitality and has contributed to a distinctly South African fusion of cultural forms. Some of the better-known features of that fusion appear in the music of jazz, religious, and popular groups such Education

Primary and secondary schools

School education is compulsory for all children between 7 and 16 years of age or through ninth grade, whichever is reached first, and begins in one of the 11 official languages. After second grade, students begin learning another language.

The right to a basic education is guaranteed in the constitution. The country has a national educational system, which oversees the education implemented in the provinces. The school system contains both private and public schools. During the apartheid era, schools run by white education departments had the best resources in the public school system, and white-oriented private schools received substantial public subsidies. Although some of these schools began to admit black pupils after 1990, informal white resistance, capacity limitations, and fees (often newly imposed with apparent exclusionary intent) generally have kept blacks out of historically white public schools. Private schools, many of which offer superior educational programs, remain largely inaccessible to most blacks because of the high cost. In an effort to rectify past inequalities, the government has pledged significant resources toward improving the physical and learning environment of the school system. To that end, the government implemented a new national curriculum in the early 21st century.

Literacy rates in South Africa are high by African standards. Since 1970, literacy rates have grown from one-half to four-fifths of the population.

Higher education

South Africa is home to many institutions of higher education. The oldest and largest of the universities is the University of South Africa (UNISA), which was established in Cape Town but is now based in Pretoria and offers correspondence courses in both English and Afrikaans. The oldest of the residential universities are those of Cape Town, Fort Hare, Stellenbosch, and the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg); of these, Stellenbosch began as an Afrikaans-language institution, while Fort Hare was originally established to serve blacks only. Other institutions in South Africa include the University of Pretoria, North-West University, the University of Johannesburg, and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. Historically, most blacks with postsecondary degrees earned them through UNISA or Fort Hare, but the English-language institutions—including the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg and Durban) and Rhodes University—admitted a few black students until 1959, when their ability to do so was restricted by apartheid legislation that they fiercely opposed. The government then established several new institutions (the Universities of the North, Zululand, Western Cape, Durban-Westville, and Vista and the Medical University) for various black groups and increased the number of black-oriented technikons, schools designed to teach technical industrial skills. The officially independent homelands of Bophuthatswana, Transkei, and Venda also established their own universities.

Even after apartheid-era restrictions were removed, many postsecondary institutions remained influenced by their historically dominant racial and ethnic character. Coloured and Indian students were integrated into historically white universities more rapidly than blacks. Professional and postgraduate courses were still concentrated at the formerly white universities until an ambitious restructuring program was undertaken in the early 21st century. Under the government’s plan, several universities and technikons were consolidated in an effort to improve the access to and quality of education available to all students regardless of race, to eliminate duplication of services, and to better meet the country’s projected workforce requirements.

Cultural life

Blending Western technology with indigenous technology, Western traditions with African and Asian traditions, South Africa is a study in contrasts. It also provides lessons in how cultures can sometimes blend, sometimes collide: for example, within a short distance of one another can be found the villas of South Africa’s white elite and the tar-paper shacks of black day labourers, office buildings with the most sophisticated electronic wiring and one-room houses that lack electricity. A great gulf still exists between the white minority and the black majority in matters of education and economic opportunity. Yet, South Africa is making steady progress in erasing some of these historic disparities and their consequences. Daily life is better for most of its people, and culture and the arts, which sometimes were forced into exile, are flourishing in the free climate of the postapartheid era.

Daily life and social customs

As they are everywhere in the world, patterns of daily life in South Africa are conditioned by social class, ethnicity, religion, and residence: the life of a black diamond miner in Limpopo province is much different from that of an Indian shopkeeper in Durban, an Afrikaner office worker in Johannesburg, or a teacher of English extraction in Cape Town. As the government struggles to expand the economy in order to provide equally for all citizens, great disparities continue to exist. Yet, all these people are likely to enjoy much the same pleasures: the company of family and friends, films from the studios of Johannesburg and Hollywood alike, music and dance, and visits to South Africa’s magnificent national parks and scenic landscapes.

The great mixture of cultures makes for a wide variety of food choices in the country, from the traditional food of various cultures to the cosmopolitan cuisine that is available in many large cities throughout the world. African food is centred around vegetables, with maize (corn) as an important staple, often in the form of a porridge known as mealie pap. A dish made from broken dried corn kernels, sugar beans, butter, onions, potatoes, chiles, and lemon is called umngqusho. It is still possible to visit a shebeen, an African tavern where beer is home-brewed. Dutch and English settlers introduced sausages and bobotie, a meat pie made with minced meat that has been cooked with brown sugar, apricots and raisins, milk-soaked mashed bread, and curry flavouring. The Portuguese introduced various fish dishes to the country. The Indian influence added spices and even samosas, savoury pastries popular as a snack. All South Africans enjoy the braai, a South African barbeque. Beef, chicken, lamb, pork, ostrich, and other game meat are savoured, although meat consumption is limited in many places because of its expense.

Among its holidays, South Africa celebrates Human Rights Day on March 21, Freedom Day on April 27 (to celebrate the first majority elections in 1994), National Women’s Day on August 9, Heritage Day on September 24, and National Day of Reconciliation on December 16.

The arts

A century and a half of white domination in most of the country (more than three centuries in the Western Cape) and the great extent of its ties to the global market economy have profoundly transformed black culture in South Africa. The strongest links to traditional societies have been through the many languages embodying the country’s cultural diversity, whose nuances of idiom and sensibility carry over into the arts. Traditional art forms such as dancing and textile weaving are used as vehicles of ethnic identity and are carefully preserved, while modern art forms from painting to literature have flourished in the years since the end of apartheid. Still, much of this has taken place through private initiatives because major institutional support for culture has been largely abandoned, especially for cultural projects perceived as elitist or European in orientation; the closing of the National Symphony Orchestra in 2000 is one such example.

Music

Many popular South African arts represent a fusion of cultural influences, such as township jazz and pop music, religious choral music, and so-called “traditional” dances performed competitively by mine workers in decidedly untraditional settings. Others are innovations created in response to new circumstances, such as the lifela song-poems composed by Sotho migrant workers to express and comment upon the life of miners. Because miners were frequently so far away from home, traditional rituals had to be performed during the weekends or on holidays. Mining companies often sponsored dances as an outlet for the men, and tourists came to view the exotic African musical forms.

South African music is a fusion of various musical styles such as traditional indigenous music, jazz, Christian religious music, and forms of popular music from the United States. These combinations are evident in the music of such performers as the African Jazz Pioneers, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, and others. During the apartheid period, black and white musicians were segregated, although they still collaborated on occasion; a notable example is Johnny Clegg, a white South African who learned traditional Zulu music and formed the mixed-race bands Juluka and Savuka, both of which had international followings. Township music, a lively form of music that flourished in the townships during the apartheid era, has also been popular within the country and abroad.

Art

Rock and cave art attributable to the San, some of which is thought to be about 26,000 years old, has been found across much of Southern Africa. The

various African societies

greatest number of paintings, which primarily depict human figures and such animals as elands, elephants, cattle, and horses, have been found in the Drakensberg mountains (part of uKhahlamba/Drakensberg Park, designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000). Terra-cotta figures dated to AD 500 are known as Lydenburg heads, named after the town in which they were discovered. Excavations at Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe in the Limpopo River valley have found gold animal statues as well as a wealth of pottery and clay animal figurines. More recently, Zulu wooden statues, produced in the 19th century before the Zulu War (1879), are further examples of South Africa’s artistic history.

South African literature proved to be an important expression of resistance against apartheid throughout the 20th century. One of its best-known works is Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), which drew world attention to the separatist system. Two decades later, literary resistance organized around journals and magazines, whose contributors were collectively known as the Sestigers (“Sixtyers,” writers of the 1960s). Reacting against the National Party’s increasingly authoritarian policies, the Sestigers grew in influence but soon divided into factions insisting on the need for violent revolution on the one hand and art for art’s sake on the other. In the 1970s many books continued to criticize the apartheid regime, including André Brink’s Kennis van die aand (1973; Looking on Darkness), Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979), and Breyten Breytenbach’s In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy (1977). Also during this time, the government enacted the Publications Act of 1974, which expanded and strengthened existing censorship policies. Many authors went into exile; some did not return until the 1990s, while others remained abroad even after the end of apartheid. Brink, however, remained in South Africa and wrote, in Writing in a State of Siege (1983), about how unsuccessful the National Party had been in silencing South African writers:

For a very long time three different streams of literature ran their course: black, Afrikaans, and English. But during the last few years a new awareness of common identity as writers has arisen, creating a new sense of solidarity in a body of informed and articulate resistance to oppression.

Black literature

Of those three streams, the least known is black literature. South Africa’s various black cultures have rich oral traditions, including narrative, poetic, historical, and epic forms

. These oral traditions, while they remain strong in their own right, especially in rural parts of the country,

, which have changed and adapted as black life has changed. While there is a fear that classical forms of the oral traditions are at risk of being lost with the spread of literacy and recorded music, these oral traditions have exerted a major influence on the written literatures of

the African cultures, which also have been influenced by literary traditions of other parts of Africa, of

South Africa, merging with literary influences from elsewhere in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, and

deeply influenced in their written work by the oral traditions of their cultures than by European forms.

Works composed in the indigenous languages have been largely ignored or dismissed as works written for the schools or as works with limited audiences, yet these novels and poems have for years been a primary means of expression for African intellectuals. No matter the size and composition of the audiences, the works are a significant part of the intellectual history of South Africa.

Other black writers, beginning in the 1930s with Solomon Plaatje and his historical novel Mhudi (1930), have explicitly used black oral history when writing in English. As literacy spread, a commercial press developed, primarily in English, that was aimed at a black audience and shaped new generations of writers. Notable were the contributors to the journal Drum, including Nat Nakasa, Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, and Lewis Nkosi, who vividly captured the rhythms of urban township life and the milieu of rising black ambitions for freedom. Government crackdowns in the 1960s crushed much of that spirit and forced Dennis Brutus, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Mazisi Kunene, and other writers into exile.

Afrikaans literature

The second stream, literature written in Afrikaans, has its origins in the culture and arts of the early Afrikaner nationalist movement. Beginning in the 1880s, the movement laid the foundation for the political nationalism that coalesced following British conquest and contributed to the ideology of apartheid. In the 1920s—through the secret organization called the Afrikaner-Broederbond and through cultural organizations—teachers, academics, Dutch Reformed Church ministers, writers, artists, and journalists began to develop a powerful, if also authoritarian, vision of an exclusive, divinely ordained national “racial” identity. That vision, promoted in literature, drama, music, and public commemorative sculpture and other forms of expression, became apartheid’s official culture, asserting the paradoxical proposition that the other, non-Afrikaner cultures should develop along their own lines, in a manner prescribed by the state.

Writers of Afrikaans literature later explored more-universal themes—such as love, conflict, nature, and daily life—and, eventually, even opposition to apartheid. The first two decades of the 20th century were dominated by such poets as Jakob Daniel du Toit and C. Louis Leipoldt. The appearance of the Dertigers (“Thirtyers,” poets of the 1930s), a group of talented poets including W.E.G. Louw, signified the new standard in Afrikaans literature. Prominent among the Sestigers, who followed decades later, were the novelists Etienne Leroux and Brink and the poet Breytenbach. Post-Sestigers writers of note include the poets Wilma Stockenström, Sheila Cussons, and Antjie Krog and the novelists Elsa Joubert, Karel Schoeman, and Etienne van Heerden.

Anglophone literature

The third stream, Anglophone literature, arose in the late 19th and the early 20th century with writers such as Olive Schreiner, an early feminist who is credited with writing the first great South African novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), and Herman Charles Bosman, whose short stories chronicled the foibles of life on the veld. After World War II Paton, Gordimer (who later was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature), and others produced what might be called a literature of the liberal conscience, combining sharp and critical social observation with meditation on the responsibilities and fates of individuals enmeshed in oppressive situations they lack the power to change.

Multicultural literature

During the 1970s there emerged in the arts powerful themes of national and multiracial, multilingual cultural patterns, as writers and artists from all backgrounds concentrated on exploring and portraying the turmoil affecting South African society. Reaction to apartheid engendered a sense of black culture and history that

both anticipated and drew upon Negritude as it was manifested in West

drew inspiration from West and North African, Caribbean, and African American intellectual movements. The themes of

Black Consciousness

black consciousness evident in the poetry and prose of urban writers such as Mothobi Mutloatse

and

, Miriam Tlali, Mbulelo Mzamane, and Njabulo Ndebele and published in such periodicals as Staffrider

are

were derived from the literary and oral traditions of

African

black languages in South Africa and in literature by

Africans

blacks in European languages.

For many decades, works with strong political themes or explicit

sexual scenes

sexuality were banned.

A large segment of Afrikaner writers became alienated from the government; authors

Authors such as

Breyten

Breytenbach, Brink, Leroux, and Dan Roodt,

André Brink, and Étienne Leroux had their works banned

whose works were banned, began exploring the cultural ground on which Afrikaners would need to make their way in a reconstructed and democratic South Africa.

The authors Adam Small and Alex La Guma have written vividly in Afrikaans and English, respectively, of the effects of racial discrimination and of the complex and frequently violent nature of life in South Africa. Many black and white writers addressing these and other themes have received international recognition.

Newly recognized writers

Writers such as J.M. Coetzee (awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature), Sipho Sepamla, and Mongane Wally Serote have joined such established figures as

Es’kia (Ezekiel)

Mphahlele,

Alan

Paton, Brink, and Leroux in bringing South African literary life to the wider world.

In 1991 Nadine Gordimer, a short-story writer and novelist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With the end of apartheid, some South African writers have tried to write about nonapartheid subjects, while others cannot seem to escape the topic.

Theatre

South African playwrights responded to the new cultural and political milieu with such innovations as multilingual plays. Support for the newer indigenous theatre came from independent and nonracial theatrical organizations, such as the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. Plays by Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema, Fatima Dike, Zakes Mda, and Pieter-Dirk Uys have been performed worldwide.

Film

Since the 1890s, when the medium was first introduced, film has been an important means of cultural expression for South African artists. The

major institutional support for culture during the apartheid years came from the provincial councils for the performing arts. These councils helped fund plays, operas, ballets, symphonies, and other cultural events. The postapartheid period brought change in such institutional matters, though under the 1993 constitution the new provinces retained control over cultural affairs.The press and broadcastingThe

country’s first major narrative film, The Kimberley Diamond Robbery, appeared in 1910. It was followed through the 1910s and ’20s by several epics that rivaled the Hollywood productions of Cecil B. DeMille, notably I.W. Schlesinger’s Symbol of Sacrifice (1918), which employed 25,000 Zulu warriors as extras to depict the Zulu War of 1879.

As is the case with other arts, film has also been used as a means of political commentary, despite official censorship in the apartheid era. In the 1970s director Ross Devenish brought Fugard’s highly political play Boesman and Lena (1973) to the screen, and Soweto-based playwright and filmmaker Gibson Kente directed How Long (Must We Suffer…)? (1976), the first major South African film made by a black artist. A Dry White Season (1989), based on a novel by Brink, used a largely American cast to bring the harsh reality of apartheid to an international audience. Other films that reached a wider audience include Afrikaner director Jamie Uys’s The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), Oliver Schmitz and Thomas Mogotlane’s Mapantsula (1988), Manie van Rensburg’s Taxi to Soweto (1991), Anant Singh and Darrell Roodt’s Sarafina! (1992), and Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi (2005), based on a novel by Fugard.

Cultural institutions

The South African National Gallery, home to 19th–20th-century African art and 16th–20th-century European art, and the District Six Museum, which honours an interracial bohemian enclave that was destroyed by government decrees during the apartheid era, are in Cape Town. Robben Island (designated a UNSECO World Heritage site in 1999), north of Cape Town in Table Bay, was once the site of an infamous prison and is now home to a museum. The National Museum at Bloemfontein contains institutes for such areas as herpetology, ornithology, mammalogy, arachnology, paleontology, archaeology, and local history. The African Art Centre in Durban exhibits work by local artists. The National Library of South Africa, the national reference and preservation repository formed in 1999 by the merger of the South African Library and the State Library, has campuses in Cape Town and Pretoria. The Nelson Mandela National Museum, honouring the life and work of Mandela, comprises three sites centred in or around Mandela’s home village in Qunu, Eastern Cape. The museum opened on Feb. 11, 2000—10 years from the day that Mandela was released from prison. A museum dedicated to the history of apartheid opened in Johannesburg in 2001. Monuments to important South African historical figures—from both the colonial era as well as the antiapartheid struggle—can be found throughout the country.

Sports and recreation

South Africans avidly participate in sports and outdoor recreational activities. The country’s national parks provide opportunities not only to view wildlife but also to pursue activities such as rock climbing and hiking. As with most other aspects of South African life, however, sports and recreational activities developed differently for whites and blacks. Whites played football (soccer), rugby, and cricket and enjoyed sports in world-class facilities, while blacks were restricted to such sports as football, boxing, and, secondarily, athletics (track and field); moreover, their facilities were poorly maintained and ill-equipped.

White South African athletes collected more than 50 Olympic medals from 1908 to 1960, but the country was suspended from the Olympic Games in 1964–92 because of its apartheid policies. During the transition from apartheid to democracy (1990–94), South Africa was readmitted to the Olympics, and a small, racially mixed Olympic team competed in the 1992 Summer Games. At the 1996 Summer Games, swimmer Penelope Heyns became the first South African Olympic gold medallist in the postapartheid era, and marathon runner Josia Thugwane earned the distinction of becoming the first black South African to claim a gold medal.

Other postapartheid sports teams have also done well. South Africa’s rugby team, the Springboks, returned to international competition in 1995 and won the Rugby World Cup that year. When South Africa’s national football team, affectionately nicknamed Bafana Bafana (Zulu for "The Boys"), returned to international competition, it won the 1996 African Cup of Nations at home, was runner-up to Egypt at the same competition in 1998, and qualified for its first World Cup finals in 1998. South Africa is scheduled to host the 2010 World Cup, the first time that an African country has been selected to do so.

Media and publishing

The white-oriented press in contemporary South Africa, which has a long tradition of free expression for whites, found itself under increasing political and legal constraints from the 1960s onward. 1950s onward and was subjected to heavy censorship in the 1980s. Legislation was passed in late 1993 and promulgated in 1994 to better ensure fairness in the press. Historically, the strongest elements of the press have been distinct English- and Afrikaans-language publishers, such as Argus and Perskor. African Black readership has expanded greatly, though some papers aimed at that market, such as The World, were banned during previous decades. Individual the apartheid period, while individual journalists were banned, detained, and threatened. During the 1980s a new independent press emerged, represented by newspapers such as New Nation and Weekly Mail. Vrye Weekblad, the first Afrikaans-language antiapartheid newspaper, closed in 1994. With South Africa’s reemergence in the world economy, foreign media interests began to take a greater interest in the local market; the largest daily newspaper group in the country was taken over by an international concern.

Television—introduced Television, introduced in the mid-1970s—and 1970s, and radio constitute important forces in South African society. Until the lifting of emergency media restrictions in February 1990, the government tightly controlled both mediums, which air programs for the different linguistic and cultural groups in the country. The government used television and radio used them to communicate its own views and to counter cultural tendencies that it perceived threats to be threatening to the implementation of apartheid system. Most electronic media remain publicly owned, but the pattern of management and public participation in their control changed decisively after 1994 as the previously from all white- and male-dominated management changed to a more representative mix under the new government.

A number of privately owned radio stations have been set up in major urban markets since the mid-1990s, and independent television productions have become more common. Increasingly, programming is aimed at the many linguistic and cultural groups in the country.

The digital revolution has markedly affected South Africa. Most major publications have an online presence, as do a rapidly growing number of companies and governmental agencies.

History

The prehistory and history of South Africa span nearly the entire known existence of human beings and their ancestors—some three million years or more—and include the wandering of small bands of hominins through the savanna, the inception of herding and farming as ways of life, and the construction of large urban centres. Through this diversity of human experience, several trends can be identified: technological and economic change, shifting systems of belief, and, in the earlier phases of humanity, the interplay between physical evolution and learned behaviour, or culture. Over much of this time frame, South Africa’s past is also that of a far wider area, and only in the last few centuries has this southernmost country of Africa had a history of its own. This article focuses on the country of South Africa. For information about the country in its regional context, see Southern Africa.

Prehistory

The earliest creatures that can be identified as ancestors of modern humans are classified as australopithecines (literally “southern apes”). The first specimen of these hominins to be found (in 1924) was the skull of a child from a quarry site at Taung in what is now the North-West province. Subsequently more australopithecine fossils were discovered in limestone caves farther northeast at Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, and Kromdraai (collectively designated a World Heritage site in 1999), where they had originally been deposited by predators and scavengers.

South Africa’s prehistory has been divided into a series of phases based on broad patterns of technology. The primary distinction is between a reliance on chipped and flaked stone implements (the Stone Age) and the ability to work iron (the Iron Age). Spanning a large proportion of human history, the Stone Age in Southern Africa is further divided into the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic Period (about 2,500,000–150,000 years ago), the Middle Stone Age, or Mesolithic Period (about 150,000–30,000 years ago), and the Late Stone Age, or Neolithic Period (about 30,000–2,000 years ago). The simple stone tools found with australopithecine fossil bones fall into the earliest part of the Early Stone Age.

The Early Stone Age

Most Early Stone Age sites in South Africa can probably be connected with the hominin species known as Homo erectus. Simply modified stones, hand axes, scraping tools, and other bifacial artifacts had a wide variety of purposes, including butchering animal carcasses, scraping hides, and digging for plant foods. Most South African archaeological sites from this period are the remains of open camps, often by the sides of rivers and lakes, although some are rock shelters, such as Montagu Cave in the Cape region.

Change occurred slowly in the Early Stone Age; for more than a million years and over a wide geographic area, only slight differences existed in the forms of stone tools. The slow alterations in hominins’ physical appearance that took place over the same time period, however, have allowed physical anthropologists to recognize new species in the genus Homo. An archaic form of H. sapiens appeared about 500,000 years ago; important specimens belonging to this physical type have been found at Hopefield in Western Cape province and at the Cave of Hearths in Mpumalanga province.

The Middle Stone Age

The long episode of cultural and physical evolution gave way to a period of more rapid change about 200,000 years ago. Hand axes and large bifacial stone tools were replaced by stone flakes and blades that were fashioned into scrapers, spear points, and parts for hafted, composite implements. This technological stage, now known as the Middle Stone Age, is represented by numerous sites in South Africa.

Open camps and rock overhangs were used for shelter. Day-to-day debris has survived to provide some evidence of early ways of life, although plant foods have rarely been preserved. Middle Stone Age bands hunted medium-sized and large prey, including antelope and zebra, although they tended to avoid the largest and most dangerous animals, such as the elephant and the rhinoceros. They also ate seabirds and marine mammals that could be found along the shore and sometimes collected tortoises and ostrich eggs in large quantities. The rich archaeological deposits of Klasies River Mouth (see Klasies), on the Cape coast west of Port Elizabeth, have preserved the first known instance of shellfish being used as a food source.

Klasies River Mouth has also provided important evidence for the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Some of the human skeletons from the lower levels of this site, possibly 115,000 years old, are decidedly modern in form. Fossils of comparable age have been excavated at Border Cave, in the mountainous region between KwaZulu-Natal province and Swaziland.

The Late Stone Age

Basic toolmaking techniques began to undergo additional change about 40,000 years ago. Small finely worked stone implements known as microliths became more common, while the heavier scrapers and points of the Middle Stone Age appeared less frequently. Archaeologists refer to this technological stage as the Late Stone Age. The numerous collections of stone tools from South African archaeological sites show a great degree of variation through time and across the subcontinent.

The remains of plant foods have been well preserved at such sites as Melkhoutboom Cave, De Hangen, and Diepkloof in the Cape region. Animals were trapped and hunted with spears and arrows on which were mounted well-crafted stone blades. Bands moved with the seasons as they followed game into higher lands in the spring and early summer months, when plant foods could also be found. When available, rock overhangs became shelters; otherwise, windbreaks were built. Shellfish, crayfish, seals, and seabirds were also important sources of food, as were fish caught on lines, with spears, in traps, and possibly with nets.

Dating from this period are numerous engravings on rock surfaces, mostly on the interior plateau, and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions, such as the Drakensberg and Cederberg ranges. The images were made over a period of at least 25,000 years. Although scholars originally saw the South African rock art as the work of exotic foreigners such as Minoans or Phoenicians or as the product of primitive minds, they now believe that the paintings were closely associated with the work of medicine men, shamans who were involved in the well-being of the band and often worked in a state of trance. Specific representations include depictions of trance dances, metaphors for trance such as death and flight, rainmaking, and control of the movement of antelope herds.

Pastoralism and early agriculture

New ways of living came to South Africa about 2,000 years ago. Until that time, human communities had survived by gathering plant foods and by hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat, but with the introduction of agriculture—arguably the single most important event in world history—people began to make use of domesticated animals and plants. This in turn led to a slow but steady rise in population and to more-complex political and religious organizations, among other things. Crops could be grown and cattle, sheep, and goats herded near permanent villages and towns in the east, where rainfall was adequate. In the more arid west, domestic livestock were kept by nomadic pastoralists, who moved over wide territories with their flocks and herds.

Although the origin of nomadic pastoralism in South Africa is still obscure, linguistic evidence points to northern Botswana as a probable source. The linguistic evidence is supported by finds of sheep bones and pottery from Bambata Cave in southwestern Zimbabwe that have been dated to about 150 BC. Whether new communities moved into South Africa with their flocks and herds or whether established hunter-gatherer bands took up completely new ways of living remains unclear. In any case, the results of archaeological excavations have shown that sheep were being herded fairly extensively by the first few centuries AD in eastern and western parts of the Cape and probably in the northern Cape as well.

While traces of ancient herding camps tend to be extremely rare, one of the best-preserved finds is at Kasteelberg, on the southwest coast near St. Helena Bay. Pastoralists there kept sheep, hunted seals and other wild animals, and gathered shellfish, repeatedly returning to the same site for some 1,500 years. Such communities were directly ancestral to the Khoekhoe (also spelled Khoikhoi) herders who encountered European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-17th century.

The archaeological traces of farmers in the eastern regions of South Africa are more substantial. The earliest sites date to the 3rd century AD, although farming was probably already well established by this time. Scatters of potsherds with distinctive incised decoration mark early village locations in Mpumalanga and parts of KwaZulu-Natal.

The Iron Age

Because the first farmers had knowledge of ironworking, their archaeological sites are characterized as Iron Age (c.AD 200). New groups of people arriving in South Africa at that time had strong connections to East Africa. They were directly ancestral to the Bantu-speaking peoples who form the majority of South Africa’s population today.

Iron Age sites

Early Iron Age farmers grew crops, cutting back the vegetation with iron hoes and axes, and herded cattle and sheep. They heavily supplemented farming by gathering wild plant foods, engaging in some hunting, and collecting shellfish if they lived near enough to the coast. Where conditions for agriculture were favourable, such as in the Tugela River valley in the east, villages grew to house several hundred people. Some trade existed between groups of farmers—evidence for specialization in salt making has been found in the northeast—and with the hunter-gatherer bands that continued to occupy most parts of South Africa. Finely made life-size ceramic heads found near the city of Lydenburg (now Mashishing) in eastern South Africa and dated to the 7th century AD are all that remains of the people who once inhabited this region.

Early Iron Age villages were built in low-lying areas, such as river valleys and the coastal plain, where forests and savannas facilitated shifting (slash-and-burn) agriculture. From the 11th century, however, in the period conventionally known as the Late Iron Age, farming communities began to settle the higher-lying grasslands. It has not been established whether these new communities were inhabited by invaders or reflected the diffusion of new knowledge to existing populations. In many areas the new communities started making different forms of pottery and built villages out of stone. Most probably these and other changes in patterns of behaviour reflect the increasing importance of cattle in economic life.

First urban centres

Other changes came in the north. Arab traders established small settlements on the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts in their search for ivory, animal skins, and other exotica. The trade beads they offered in return began to reach villages in the interior, the first indications that the more complex economic and social structures associated with long-distance trade were developing. The arid Limpopo River valley, avoided by the earliest farmers, developed as a trade route. Sites such as Pont Drift (c. 800–1100) and Schroda (dated to the 9th century) show that their occupants were wealthy in both livestock and trade beads.

The Limpopo River valley was also the setting in which Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe developed as South Africa’s first urban centres during the 11th century. Starting as a large village like Schroda and Pont Drift, Mapungubwe rapidly developed into a town of approximately 10,000 people. Differences in status were clearly demarcated: the elite lived and were buried at the top of the stark sandstone hill at the town’s centre, while the rest of the population lived in the valley below. Hilltop graves contained lavish burial goods, including a carefully crafted gold rhinoceros and evidence of specialized crafts such as bone and ivory working. Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe were abandoned after the 13th century after having been occupied for several hundred years. The trade connections that the Limpopo valley offered were taken over by Great Zimbabwe, farther to the north.

Europeans in South Africa

The first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, their occupants intent on gaining a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East. Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way around the South African coast, but the only direct African contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in present-day Mozambique. Both the British and the Dutch challenged the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route from the early 17th century. The British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay in 1620, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain for provisioning their fleets.

Settlement of the Cape Colony

The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend to establish more than a minimal presence at the southernmost part of Africa. Because farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, however, nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River in 1657. The company made it clear that the Khoekhoe were not to be enslaved, so, beginning in that same year, slaves arrived in the Cape from West and East Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula. By the end of the century, the imprint of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear, with settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, growing wheat, tending vineyards, and grazing their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains some 30 miles (50 km) away. A 1707 census of the Dutch at the Cape listed 1,779 settlers owning 1,107 slaves.

In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, pastoralists had readily traded with the Dutch. However, as the garrison’s demand for cattle and sheep continued to increase, the Khoekhoe became more wary. The Dutch offered tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets for livestock. Numerous conflicts followed, and, beginning in 1713, many Khoekhoe communities were ravaged by smallpox. At the same time, colonial pastoralists—the Boers, also called trekboers—began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. The Khoekhoe chiefdoms were largely decimated by the end of the 18th century, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms. The San—small bands of hunter-gatherers—fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. The men were slaughtered, and the women and children were taken into servitude.

The trekboers constantly sought new land, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, into the grasslands that long had been occupied by African farmers. For many generations these farmers had lived in settlements concentrated along the low ridges that break the monotony of the interior plateau. While it is difficult to make population estimates, it is thought that some of the larger villages could have housed several hundred people. Cattle were held in elaborately built stone enclosures, the ruins of which survive today across a large part of Free State province and in the higher areas north of the Vaal River. Extensive exchange networks brought iron for hoes and spears from specialized manufacturing centres in the Mpumalanga Lowveld and the deep river gorges of KwaZulu-Natal.

Thus, by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa had fallen into two broad regions: west and east. Colonial settlement dominated the west, including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the present-day border with Namibia, and the dry lands of the interior. Trekboers took increasingly more land from the Khoekhoe and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became labourers tied to the farms of their new overlords. Indigenous farmers controlled both the coastal and valley lowlands and the Highveld of the interior in the east, where summer rainfall and good grazing made mixed farming economies possible.

Cape Town was developing into South Africa’s major urban centre, although it took many years for it to equal the size that Mapungubwe had attained some five centuries earlier. The initial grid of streets had been expanded and linked the company’s garden to the new fortress that overlooked Table Bay. Houses featuring flat roofs, ornate pediments, and symmetrical facades sheltered officials, merchants, and visitors en route between Europe and the East. A governor and council administered the town and colony. While the economy was in principle directed by the interests of the Dutch East India Company, in practice corruption and illegal trading were dominant forces. Both the town and the colony existed in large part because of slaves, who by now outnumbered their owners.

Growth of the colonial economy

From 1770 to 1870 the region became more fully integrated into the world capitalist economy. Trekboers, who were weakly controlled by the Dutch East India Company, advanced across the semidesert Karoo of the central Cape and collided with African agricultural peoples along a line running from the lower Vaal and middle Orange river valleys to the sea around the Gamtoos River (west of modern Port Elizabeth). These agriculture-based African societies proved resilient but, even at their height in the 1860s, were unable to unite completely enough to expel the Europeans.

The decisive moment for the colony occurred in 1806 when Britain seized Cape Colony during the Napoleonic Wars. Initially the colony’s importance was related to its function as a strategic base to protect Britain’s developing empire in India. In the next few years, however, it also served as a market, a source of raw materials, and an outlet for emigration from Britain.

African societies after the 1760s were increasingly affected by ivory and slave traders operating from Delagoa Bay, Inhambane, and the lower Zambezi River in the northeast as well as by traders and raiders based in the Cape to the south. In response to these invasions, the farming communities created a number of sister states different in structure, scale, and military capacity from anything that had existed before. The Pedi and Swazi in the eastern Highveld, the Zulu south of the Pongola River, the Sotho to the east of the Caledon River valley, the Gaza along the lower Limpopo, and the Ndebele in present-day southwestern Zimbabwe proved to be the most successful.

The areas of the western Cape with the longest history of settlement by Europeans had evolved an agricultural economy based on wheat farming and viticulture, worked by imported slave labour. Slaves were treated harshly, and punishments for slaves who assaulted Europeans were brutal—one of the most heinous being death by impalement. Escaped slaves formed groups called Maroons—small self-sufficient communities—or fled into the interior. Because slave birth rates were low and settler numbers were increasing, in the 1780s the Dutch stepped up the enserfment of surviving Khoe (also spelled Khoi; pejoratively called Hottentots) to help run their farms. Those Khoe who could escape Dutch subjugation joined Xhosa groups in a major counteroffensive against colonialism in 1799–1801, and there were slave rebellions in the outskirts of Cape Town in 1808 and 1825.

The Dutch refusal to grant citizenship and land rights to the “Coloured” offspring of unions between Europeans and Khoe or slaves produced an aggrieved class of people, known as Basters (or Bastards), who were Christian, spoke Dutch, and had an excellent knowledge of horses and firearms. Many fled north toward and over the Orange River in search of land and trading opportunities. After merging with independent Khoe groups, such as the Kora, they formed commando states under warlords, three of the more successful being the Bloem, Kok, and Barends families, who were persuaded by missionaries in the early 19th century to change their name to Griqua. By the 1790s they were trading with and raiding local African communities such as the Rolong, Tlhaping, Hurutshe, and Ngwaketse. For self-defense some of these African communities formed larger groupings who competed against each other in their quest to control trade routes going south to the Cape and east to present-day Mozambique.

The Portuguese and also some British, French, Americans, and Arabs traded beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms along the southeast coast in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, wax, and skins. During the late 18th century, large volumes of ivory were exported annually from Delagoa Bay, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Usutu (a major tributary of the Maputo) river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay and coastal trade routes with the central interior.

European trade precipitated structural transformation within societies inland of Delagoa Bay. Warlords reorganized military institutions to hunt elephants and slaves. Profits from this trade enhanced the warlords’ ability to disperse patronage, attract followers, and raise military potential and, in turn, their capacity to dominate land, people, and cattle. Near the bay, Tembe and Maputo were already powerful states by the 1790s. To the west of the coastal lowlands emerged the Maroteng of Thulare, the Dlamini of Ndvungunye, and the Hlubi of Bhungane. Between the Pongola and Tugela rivers evolved the Mthethwa of Dingiswayo south of Lake St. Lucia, the Ndwandwe of Zwide, the Qwabe of Phakatwayo, the Chunu of Macingwane, and, south of the Tugela, the Cele and Thuli. Several groups—for example, the Mthethwa, Ndwandwe, and Qwabe—later merged with the Zulu. These groups competed to dominate trade and became more militarized the closer they were to the Portuguese base.

The Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal by the 1860s. European settlement advanced to the edges of the Kalahari region in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Armed clashes erupted over land and cattle, such as those between the Boers and various Xhosa groups in the southeast beginning in the 1780s, and Africans lost most of their land and were henceforth forced to work for the settlers. The population of European settlers increased from some 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. Although it is difficult to accurately estimate the African population, it probably numbered somewhere between two and four million.

Increased European presence (c. 1810–35)

British occupation of the Cape

When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company’s role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape’s economy was meshed with that of Britain. To protect the developing economy there, Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market until the mid-1820s. Merino sheep were introduced, and intensive sheep farming was initiated in order to supply wool to British textile mills.

The infrastructure of the colony began to change: English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch rix-dollar; and newspaper publishing began in Cape Town in 1824. After Britain began appointing colonial governors, an advisory council for the governor was established in 1825, which was upgraded to a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. A virtual freehold system of landownership gradually replaced the existing Dutch tenant system, under which European colonists had paid a small annual fee to the government but had not acquired land ownership.

A large group of British settlers arrived in 1820; this, together with a high European birth rate and wasteful land usage, produced an acute land shortage, which was alleviated only when the British acquired more land through massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British vision of the colony did not include African citizens (referred to pejoratively by the British as “Kaffirs”), so, as Africans lost their land, they were expelled across the Great Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony.

The first step in this process included attacks in 1811–12 by the British army on the Xhosa groups, the Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe. An attack by the Rharhabe-Xhosa on Graham’s Town (Grahamstown) in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of more African territory, to the Keiskamma River. Various Rharhabe-Xhosa groups were driven from their lands throughout the early 1830s. They counterattacked in December 1834, and Governor Benjamin D’Urban ordered a major invasion the following year, during which thousands of Rharhabe-Xhosa died. The British crossed the Great Kei River and ravaged territory of the Gcaleka-Xhosa as well; the Gcaleka chief, Hintsa, invited to hold discussions with British military officials, was held hostage and died trying to escape. The British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg, who disapproved of D’Urban’s policy, halted the seizure of all African land east of the Great Kei. D’Urban’s initial attempt to rule conquered Africans with European magistrates and soldiers was overturned by Glenelg; instead, for a time, Africans east of the Keiskamma retained their autonomy and dealt with the colony through diplomatic agents.

The British had chronic difficulties procuring enough labour to build towns and develop new farms. Indeed, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the British in Southern Africa continued to import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labour problem. A ban in 1809 on Africans crossing into the Cape aggravated the labour shortage, and so the British, like the Dutch before them, made the Khoe serfs through the Caledon (1809) and Cradock (1812 ) codes.

Anglo-Boer commandos provided another source of African labour by illegally capturing San women and children (many of the men were killed) as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends captured more Africans from among people such as the Hurutshe, Rolong, and Kwena. Other people, such as those known as the Mantatees, were forced to become farmworkers, mainly in the eastern Cape. European farmers also raided for labour north of the Orange River.

Cape authorities overhauled their policy in 1828 in order to facilitate labour distribution and to align the region with the growing imperial antislavery ethos. Ordinance 49 permitted black labourers from east of the Keiskamma to go into the colony for work if they possessed the proper contracts and passes, which were issued by soldiers and missionaries. This was the beginning of the pass laws that would become so notorious in the 20th century. Ordinance 50 briefly ended the restrictions placed on the Khoe, including removing the requirement for passes, and allowed them to choose their employers, own land, and move more freely. Because an insufficient labour force still existed, Anglo-Boer armies (supported by Khoe, Tembu, Gcaleka, and Mpondo auxiliaries) acquired their own workers by attacking the Ngwane east of the Great Kei at Mbolompo in August 1828. The formal abolition of slavery took place in 1834–38, and control of African labourers became stricter through the Masters and Servants Ordinance (1841), which imposed criminal penalties for breach of contract and desertion of the workplace and increased the legal powers of settler employers.

The Delagoa Bay slave trade

While events were unfolding at the Cape, the slave trade at Delagoa Bay had been expanding since about 1810 in response to demands for labour from plantations in Brazil and on the Mascarene Islands. During the late 1820s, slave exports from the Delagoa Bay area reached several thousand a year, in advance of what proved to be an ineffective attempt to abolish the Brazilian trade in 1830. After a dip in the early 1830s, the Bay slave trade peaked in the late 1840s.

The impact of the slave trade was increasing destabilization of hinterland societies as populations were forcibly removed. The Gaza, Ngoni, and other groups became surrogate slavers and joined the Portuguese soldiers in inland raiding. Along the Limpopo and Vaal river networks, Delagoa Bay slavers competed with Griqua slavers in supplying the Cape. After slavers burned crops and famines became common, many groups—including the Ngwane, Ndebele, and some Hlubi—fled westward into the Highveld mountains during the 1810s and ’20s. The Kololo, on the other hand, moved east out of Transorangia, where they ran into Bay slavers, and migrated west into Botswana. In 1826 they were attacked by an alliance of Ngwaketse and European mercenaries and ended up in Zambia in the 1850s exporting slaves themselves to the Arabs and Portuguese.

Emergence of the eastern states

Four main defensive African state clusters had emerged in eastern South Africa by the 1820s: the Pedi (led by Sekwati) in the Steelpoort valley, the Ngwane (led by Sobhuza) in the eastern Transvaal, the Mokoteli (led by Moshoeshoe) in the Caledon River region, and the Zulu (led by Shaka) south of the Swart-Mfolozi River. The Pedi received refugees from the Limpopo and coastal plains, and the Mokoteli absorbed eastern Transorangian refugees, which enabled them to defeat the Griqua and Korana raiders by the mid-1830s. By 1825 Shaka had welded the Chunu, Mthethwa, Qwabe, Mkhize, Cele, and other groups into a large militarized state with fortified settlements called amakhanda. Zulu amabutho (age sets or regiments) defended against raiders, provided protection for refugees, and, apparently, began to trade in ivory and slaves themselves.

From 1824 the Zulu began to clash with Cape colonists who came to Port Natal (renamed Durban in 1835) and organized mercenary armies. These groups were comparable to the Portuguese prazero armies along the Zambezi and to the warlord state set up by the Portuguese trader João Albasini in the eastern Transvaal in the 1840s, but they operated on a smaller scale. During the 1820s European raiders joined Zulu amabutho in attacking areas north of the Swart-Mfolozi River and south of the Mzimkulu River, where in the mid-1820s French ships exported slaves. Francis Farewell’s raiders, in alliance with Zulu groups, seized women and children in the same area in 1828.

Conflicts split the Zulu elite into rival factions and led to Shaka’s assassination in 1828. Shaka’s half brother Dingane became the Zulu leader, but his succession was accompanied by civil wars and by increasing interference in the Delagoa Bay trading alliances. By the mid-1830s a coalition of Cape merchants had begun planning for the formal colonization of Natal, with its superb agricultural soils and temperate climate. The British left the less-desirable malaria-ridden Delagoa Bay region to the Portuguese, who traded slaves out of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo, Mozam.) for another half century.

The expansion of European colonialism (c. 1835–70)

The Great Trek

A few Boer settlers had moved north of the Orange River before 1834, but after that the number increased significantly, a migration later known as the Great Trek. The common view that this was a bid to escape the policies of the British—i.e., the freeing of slaves—is difficult to sustain, as most of the former slave owners did not migrate (most trekkers came from the poorer east Cape), and the earlier labour shortage had been alleviated by 1835. Instead, the trek was more of an explosive culmination of a long sequence of colonial labour raids, land seizures, punitive commando raids, and commercial expansions. Europeans, who possessed technologically advanced weaponry, also had instructive examples of how small groups of raiders in Natal and Transorangia could cause disruption over large areas. Thus, the trekkers should not be seen as backward feudalists escaping the modern world, as some historians have maintained, but as energized people extending their frontier.

Several thousand Boers migrated with their families, livestock, retainers, wagons, and firearms into a region already destabilized and partially depopulated by Griqua and coastal raiders. They did encounter some Africans (such as the Ndebele), who in the early 1830s had moved from the southeastern to the western Transvaal. The Boers and their Rolong, Taung, and Griqua allies, however, crushed the Ndebele during 1837, taking their land and many cattle, women, and children. The remaining Ndebele fled north, where they resettled in southern Zimbabwe.

The trekkers had penetrated much of the Transvaal by the early 1840s. A grouping of commando states emerged based at Potchefstroom, Pretoria, and, from 1845, Ohrigstad-Lydenburg in the eastern Transvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, Andries Pretorius, Jan Mocke, and others competed for followers, attacked weaker African chiefdoms, hunted elephants and slaves, and forged trading links with the Portuguese. Other Boers turned east into Natal and allied themselves with the resident British settlers. Farms developed slowly and, as had been the case in the Cape prior to the 1830s, depended on forced labour. Until the 1860s the Pedi and Swazi in the east and even the Kwena and Hurutshe in the west were strong enough to avoid being conscripted as labour and thus limited the labour supply.

The British in Natal

The appearance of thousands of British settlers in Natal in the 1840s and ’50s meant that for the first time Africans and European settlers lived together—however uneasily—on the same land. The Boers began to carve out farms in Natal as they had done along the eastern frontier, but further slave and cattle raids on the Bhaca south of the Mzimkulu provided the pretext for British annexation of Natal in 1843. Theophilus Shepstone received an appointment in 1845 as a diplomatic agent (later secretary for native affairs), and his position served as a prototype for later native commissioners. The Harding Commission (1852) set aside reserves for Africans, and missionaries and pliant chiefs were brought in to persuade Africans to work. After 1849 Africans became subject to a hut tax intended to raise revenue and drive them into labour. Roads were built, using forced labour, and Africans were obliged to pay rent on state land and European farms. To meet these burdens some African cultivators grew surplus crops to sell to the growing towns of Pietermaritzburg and Durban.

The British were reluctant, though, to annex the Transorangian interior, where no strategic interests existed. Boer trade links with Delagoa Bay posed little threat because Portugal was virtually a client state of Britain. To the Boers fell the tasks of eroding African resistance and developing the land, although the policy never received clear enunciation or much financial backing. Britain halfheartedly attempted to protect some of its African client states, such as that of the Griqua and the Sotho state led by Moshoeshoe. However, after further fighting with the Rharhabe-Xhosa on the eastern frontier in 1846, Governor Colonel Harry Smith finally annexed, over the next two years, not only the region between the Great Fish and the Great Kei rivers (establishing British Kaffraria) but also a large area between the Orange and Vaal rivers, thus establishing the Orange River Sovereignty. These moves provoked further warfare in 1851–53 with the Xhosa (joined once more by many Khoe), with a few British politicians ineffectively trying to influence events.

A striking feature of this period was the capacity of the Sotho people to fend off military conquest by the British and Boers. After defeating and absorbing the rival Tlokwa in 1853–54, Moshoeshoe became the most powerful African leader south of the Vaal-Pongolo rivers. His soldiers utilized firearms and, in the cold Highveld, horses—which proved to be the keys to political and military survival there.

Attempts at Boer consolidation

Faced with these unprofitable conflicts, the British temporarily withdrew from the southern African interior, and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers gained independence through the Sand River and Bloemfontein conventions (1852 and 1854, respectively). Both Boer groups wrote constitutions and established Volksraade (parliaments), although their attempts at unification failed. For more than a decade, civil wars and the struggle with the environment hampered consolidation among the Boers. Nevertheless, the Orange Free State’s economy grew rapidly, and by the 1860s the Boers were exporting significant amounts of wool via Cape ports.

The Cape economy

Capitalist infrastructure came earlier to the Cape than to the Boer regions because of its older colonial history and its seacoast links to the British Empire. Banks, insurance companies, and limited-liability companies arose in the 1840s and ’50s, and a class of prosperous colonial shopkeepers, financiers, traders, and farmers emerged as Cape Town grew to more than 30,000 people in the 1850s. Port Elizabeth, established in 1820, also became an important trading centre and harbour. The British government granted the Cape settlers what was termed “representative government” in March 1853 (the Legislative Assembly had elected members, with an executive appointed from London) and “responsible government” in 1872 (the assembly appointed the executive). Franchise qualifications were relatively low, and even some Africans could vote, although their small number had no political impact. These nominal rights were reduced later in the century and abolished outright in 1936.

Between 1811 and 1858 colonial aggression deprived Africans of most of their land between the Sundays and Great Kei rivers and produced poverty and despair. From the mid-1850s British magistrates held political power in British Kaffraria, destroying the power of the Xhosa chiefs. Following a severe lung sickness epidemic among their cattle in 1854–56, the Xhosa killed many of their remaining cattle and in 1857–58 grew few crops in response to a millenarian prophecy that this would cause their ancestors to rise from the dead and destroy the whites. Many thousands of Xhosa starved to death, and large numbers of survivors were driven into the Cape Colony to work. British Kaffraria fused with the Cape Colony in 1865, and thousands of Africans newly defined as Fingo resettled east of the Great Kei, thereby creating Fingoland. The Transkei, as this region came to be known, consisted of the hilly country between the Cape and Natal. It became a large African reserve and grew in size when those parts that were still independent were annexed in the 1880s and ’90s (Pondoland lost its independence in 1894).

European missionaries and their African catechists worked unremittingly from the 1820s to Christianize indigenous communities and to introduce them to European manufactured goods they had previously done well without. Whatever intentions the missionaries may have had, their efforts undermined African worldviews and contributed to the destruction of traditional African communities throughout South Africa. For a time nevertheless, a small number of African peasant farmers used plows, paid rents and taxes, produced for the market, and sold surplus grain to the towns in competition with colonial farmers. The difficulty they encountered obtaining capital, however, as well as the legal and political discrimination they faced, drove most of them out of business in the decades following the South African War of 1899–1902.

The Cape economy, narrowly based on wine and wool, was not particularly prosperous. Wool exports, though soaring to some 6,000 tons in 1855, lagged far behind those of Australia and remained susceptible to drought and market slumps. African labour built roads, but only a few miles of railway were constructed before 1870. Various alternatives that would broaden the economic base were explored. Accumulations of guano (droppings of gannets and cormorants used as fertilizer) were exploited on off-coast islands; copper mining began in the southwestern party of the country; hunters operating as far north as the Zambezi sent back large quantities of ivory; and traders, hunters, missionaries, and full-time prospectors surveyed and sampled the rocks. The most potentially rewarding commodities were diamonds discovered in the Vaal valley and gold found in the Tati valley and in the northern and eastern Transvaal between 1866 and 1871.

Disputes in the north and east

To the north, colonial communities and African states alternately cooperated and competed with each other, with the advantage slowly moving to the colonists. The Swazi and Gaza supplied slaves both to the Transvaal Boers and to the Portuguese. During the 1850s the Swazi overran much of the Lowveld, where they absorbed many groups and exchanged captured children for firearms and horses with the Transvaal settlers. After the death of Soshangane (leader of the Gaza state) in 1856, a Gaza civil war broke out that also involved the Swazi, Boers, and Portuguese. After the Swazi gained control of land almost to Maputo in 1864, the Gaza (under the victorious Mzila) migrated northward into the Buzi River area of present-day eastern Zimbabwe.

Farther south the Zulu competed with the Swazi and the Boers to dominate the Pongolo and Ngwavuma valleys and with the Boers to control the Buffalo (Mziniathi) River area. The colonial administrator, Theophilus Shepstone, interfered not only in Zulu politics but also in Ndebele succession dispute (1869–72), attempting to oust the eventual leader (Lobengula) in favour of a pretender. Marthinus Pretorius, the Transvaal leader, annexed huge areas, at least on paper. To the irritation of settler farmers and plantation owners, few Zulu went south to work in Natal. Instead, a supply of Mozambican indentured labourers (some of them forced) entered the region. This eventually evolved into a steady flow of migrant workers in the following decades, but, because not enough labour appeared initially in the early 1860s, indentured labourers from India were brought in to work on the new sugar plantations.

The Sotho continued their tenacious hold on their lands along the Caledon River and for a time supplied the Boers of the Orange Free State with grain and cattle. The Sotho mobilized a force of 10,000 and defeated the Boers in 1858. The Boers, however, coveted the fertile Caledon valley and defeated the Sotho eight years later after the Boers regained their unity. The Sotho were forced to sign the Treaty of Thaba Bosiu (1866), and only British annexation of Sotho territory in 1868 prevented their complete collapse.

The Zulu after Shaka

The Zulu, although initially successful at repelling the Europeans, were, like the Ndebele, eventually overpowered by them in clashes such as the Battle of Blood (Ncome) River in 1838. Boer attacks on the Zulu between 1838 and 1839 precipitated a Zulu civil war between Dingane and Mpande. The latter allied himself with the Boer invaders and so split the kingdom. Between 1839 and 1840 the Boers seized large parts of the Zulu kingdom, including the area between the Tugela and the Swart-Mfolozi. When the British in turn evicted the Boers and annexed Natal in 1843, the southern region to the Tugela was restored to the Zulu. Mpande (reigned 1840–72), a formidable ruler, controlled territory between the Tugela in the south and, roughly, the Pongolo in the north, boundaries that were not seriously disturbed until 1879.

In 1856 the primary conflict in the Zulu civil war (the Battle of Ndondakasuka on the lower Tugela River, close to the sea) elevated Mpande’s younger son, Cetshwayo, over Mpande’s older son, Mbuyazi. Although Cetshwayo formally became ruler of Zululand only upon his father’s death in 1872, he had in fact effectively ruled the kingdom since the early 1860s.

By the late 1870s, colonial officials had identified the Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation, and in January 1879 British and colonial troops invaded Zululand (see Zulu War). During his rule Mpande had expanded Zulu military capacity, and Cetshwayo used this effectively against the British invaders at Isandhlwana in 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandhlwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed (see Battles of Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift). For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed military defeat. British divide-and-rule policies precipitated another civil war in 1883, and Zululand was annexed in 1887.

The decline of the African states

As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. Not only did many important African leaders die during this period (Soshangane in 1858, Sekwati of the Pedi in 1861, Mswati in 1865, Mzilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshoe in 1870, and Mpande in 1872), but, increasingly, Europeans were determined to exploit Africans as a source of labour and to acquire the last large fertile areas controlled by them.

Colonial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood attempts to bring them under the settlers’ control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Xhosa war of 1877–78 (see Cape Frontier Wars). Between 1878 and 1881 the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Griqualand West, the Transkei, and Basutoland. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of the Cape and high commissioner for southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms had to be tamed in order to facilitate political and economic integration of the region.

Governor George Grey had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds reactivated this idea. The annexation of Basutoland in 1868 began a series of movements toward consolidation that included the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Griqua, Tlhaping, and Boers in 1871 (the Keate Award), Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon’s more determined federation plan of 1875, Shepstone’s invasion of the Transvaal in 1877, and the British invasions of Zululand and Pediland in 1879. British troops also took part in an 1879 campaign that crushed Pedi military power in the northern Transvaal. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893–96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, by 1900 no autonomous African societies remained in the region.

Diamonds, gold, and imperialist intervention (1870–1902)

South Africa experienced a transformation between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African War ended. Midway between these dates, in 1886, the world’s largest goldfields were discovered on the Witwatersrand. As the predominantly agrarian societies of European South Africa began to urbanize and industrialize, the region evolved into a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy; gold especially was urgently needed to back national currencies and ensure the continued flow of expanding international trade. British colonies, Boer republics, and African kingdoms all came under British control. These dramatic changes were propelled by two linked forces: the development of a capitalist mining industry and a sequence of imperialist interventions by Britain.

Diamonds and confederation

A chance find in 1867 had drawn several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers. Richer finds in “dry diggings” in 1870 led to a large-scale rush. By the end of 1871 nearly 50,000 people lived in a sprawling polyglot mining camp that was later named Kimberley.

Initially, individual diggers, black and white, worked small claims by hand. As production rapidly centralized and mechanized, however, ownership and labour patterns were divided more starkly along racial lines. A new class of mining capitalists oversaw the transition from diamond digging to mining industry as joint-stock companies bought out diggers. The industry became a monopoly by 1889 when De Beers Consolidated Mines (controlled by Cecil Rhodes) became the sole producer. Although some white diggers continued to work as overseers or skilled labourers, from the mid-1880s the workforce consisted mainly of black migrant workers housed in closed compounds by the companies (a method that had previously been used in Brazil).

The diamond zone was simultaneously claimed by the Orange Free State, the South African Republic, the western Griqua under Nicolaas Waterboer, and southern Tswana chiefs. At a special hearing in October 1871, Robert W. Keate (then lieutenant governor of Natal) found in favour of Waterboer, but the British persuaded him to request protection against his Boer rivals, and the area was annexed as Griqualand West.

The annexation of the diamond fields signaled a more progressive British policy under a Liberal ministry but fell short of the ambitious confederation policy pursued by Lord Carnarvon, the colonial secretary in Benjamin Disraeli’s 1874 Conservative government; he sought to unite the republics and colonies into a self-governing federation in the British Empire, a concept inspired by Theophilus Shepstone, who, as secretary for native affairs in Natal, urged a coherent regional policy with regard to African labour and administration.

Carnarvon concentrated at first on persuading the Cape and the Free State to accept federation, but a conference in London in August 1876 revealed how unreceptive these parties were to the proposal. With his southern gambit frustrated, Carnarvon embarked on a northern strategy. The South African Republic (Transvaal), virtually bankrupt, had suffered military humiliation at the hands of the Pedi, and support for President Thomas F. Burgers had declined because of this. Carnarvon commissioned Shepstone to annex the Transvaal, and, after encountering only token resistance at the beginning of 1877, he proclaimed it a British colony a few months later.

The new possession proved difficult to administer as empty coffers and insensitivity to Afrikaner resentments led to a clash over tax payments, and, under a triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert, and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, the Transvaal Boers opted to fight for independence. British defeats, especially at Majuba in 1881, ended British insistence on the concept of confederation. By the London Convention of 1884, republican self-government was restored, subject to an imprecise British “suzerainty” over external relations.

Afrikaner and African politics in the Cape

The white population in the Cape numbered 240,000 by the mid-1870s and constituted about one-third of the colony’s population. Cape revenues accounted for three-fourths of the total income in the region’s four settler states in 1870, as the diamond discoveries created more revenue that could be used to build railways and public works. Although by this time some two-thirds of the settler population spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, political power rested largely with an English-speaking elite of merchants, lawyers, and landholders.

The conflict between Afrikaners and English speakers led to the establishment of the Afrikaner Bond in 1879. The Bond initially represented poorer farmers and espoused an anti-British Pan-Afrikanerism in the Cape and beyond, but, after its reorganization a few years later under Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, the group began to champion the Cape’s commercial interests and acquired a new base of support—mainly wealthier farmers and urban professionals. When Hofmeyr threw his support behind Cecil Rhodes in 1890, he enabled Rhodes to become prime minister of the Cape; their alliance stemmed from a mutual desire for northward economic expansion. A major cleavage, however, opened up between Bond politicians and the English-speaking voters loosely defined as Cape liberals. The latter, particularly those in constituencies in the eastern Cape that had a significant percentage of black male voters, were tactically friendly to the small enfranchised stratum of fairly prosperous black peasants, whereas the Bond and most English-speaking white voters were hostile toward the black farmers growing cash crops and pursued more-restrictive franchise qualifications.

The number of blacks in the colony greatly increased between 1872 and 1894 as heretofore independent territories were annexed to the Cape. As black farmers became more prosperous and as more blacks became literate clerks and teachers, many individuals qualified to vote. The rise of the Afrikaner Bond and new laws affecting franchise qualifications and taxes also stimulated more-vigorous black participation in electoral politics after 1884. New political and educational bodies came into existence in the eastern Cape, as did the first black newspapers and black-controlled churches. The period also witnessed the first political organizations among Coloureds in the Cape and Indians in Natal and the Transvaal.

Gold mining

Prospectors established in 1886 the existence of a belt of gold-bearing reefs 40 miles (60 km) wide centred on present-day Johannesburg. The rapid growth of the gold-mining industry intensified processes started by the diamond boom: immigration, urbanization, capital investment, and labour migrancy. By 1899 the gold industry attracted investment worth £75 million, produced almost three-tenths of the world’s gold, and employed more than 100,000 people (the overwhelming majority of them black migrant workers).

The world’s richest goldfield was also the most difficult to work. Although the gold ore was abundant, the layers of it ran extremely deep, and the ore contained little gold. To be profitable, gold mining had to be intensive and deep-level, requiring large inputs of capital and technology. A group system, whereby more than 100 companies had been arranged into nine holding companies, or “groups,” facilitated collusion between companies to reduce competition over labour and keep costs down. The gold mines rapidly established a pattern of labour recruitment, remuneration, and accommodation that left its stamp on subsequent social and economic relations in the country. White immigrant miners, because of their skills, scarcity, and political power, won relatively high wages. In contrast, the more numerous unskilled black migrants from throughout Southern Africa, especially from present-day Mozambique, earned low pay (at century’s end about one-ninth the wage of white miners). Migrant miners were housed in compounds, which facilitated their control and reduced overhead costs.

The road to war

Even before the discovery of gold, the South African interior was an arena of tension and competition. Germany annexed South West Africa in 1884. The Transvaal claimed territory to its west; Britain countered by designating the territory the Bechuanaland protectorate and then annexed it as the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land north of the Limpopo River, founded the British South Africa Company, and in 1890 dispatched a pioneer column to occupy what became known as Rhodesia.

While these forces jostled for position in the region at large, the domestic politics of the Transvaal became unsettled. Paul Kruger’s government made strenuous efforts to accommodate the mining industry, but it was soon at loggerheads with Britain, the mine magnates, and the British and other non-Afrikaner Uitlander (“Outlander”) immigrants. British policy makers expressed concern about the Transvaal’s potential as an independent actor, and deep-level-mine owners chafed at mine bosses’ corruption and inefficiency. The grievances of the Uitlanders, largely excluded from the vote, provided both cause and cover for a conspiracy between British officials and mining capitalists. An Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg was to be supported by an armed invasion from Bechuanaland, headed by Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes’s lieutenant, who would intervene to “restore order.”

The plot was botched. The Uitlander rising did not take place, but Jameson went ahead with his incursion in December 1895, and within days he and his force had been rounded up. While Rhodes had to resign as prime minister of the Cape, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain managed to conceal his complicity. The Jameson Raid polarized Anglo-Boer sentiment in South Africa, simultaneously exacerbating republican suspicions, Uitlander agitation, and imperial anxieties.

In February 1898 Kruger was elected to a fourth term as president of the Transvaal. He entered a series of negotiations with Sir Alfred Milner (who became high commissioner and governor of the Cape in 1897) over the issue of the Uitlander franchise. Milner declared in private early in 1898 that “war has got to come” and adopted intransigent positions. The Cape government, headed by William P. Schreiner, attempted to mediate, as did Marthinus Steyn, the president of Free State, even while he attached his cause to Kruger’s. In September 1899 the two Boer republics gave an ultimatum to Britain, and, when it expired on October 11, Boer forces invaded Natal.

The South African War (1899–1902)

While the government of Lord Salisbury in Britain went to war to secure its hegemony in Southern Africa, the Boer republics did so to preserve their independence. The expensive and brutal colonial war lasted two and a half years and pitted almost 500,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers, Cape “rebels,” and foreign volunteers. The numerical weakness of the Boers was offset by their familiarity with the terrain, support from the Afrikaner populace, and the poor leadership and dated tactics of the British command. Although often styled a “white man’s war,” both sides used blacks extensively as labour, and at least 10,000 blacks fought for the British.

In the first phase of the war, Boer armies took the offensive and punished British forces at Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein in December 1899 (“Black Week”). During 1900 Britain rushed reinforcements to the front, relieved sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking, and took Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. In the third phase, Boer commandos avoided conventional engagements in favour of guerrilla warfare. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, devised a scorched-earth policy against the commandos and the rural population supporting them, in which he destroyed arms, blockaded the countryside, and placed the civilian population in concentration camps. Some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of disease and malnutrition in these camps, while 14,000 blacks died in separate camps. In Britain the Liberal opposition vehemently objected to the government’s methods for winning the war.

Boer forces, which at the end consisted of about 20,000 exhausted and demoralized troops, sued for peace in May 1902. The Treaty of Vereeniging reflected the conclusive military victory of British power but made a crucial concession. It promised that the “question of granting the franchise to natives [blacks]” would be addressed only after self-government had been restored to the former Boer republics. The treaty thus allowed the white minority to decide the political fate of the black majority.

Reconstruction, union, and segregation (1902–29)

The Union of South Africa was born on May 31, 1910, created by a constitutional convention (in Durban in 1908) and an act of the British Parliament (1909). The infant state owed its conception to centralizing and modernizing forces generated by mineral discoveries, and its character was shaped by eight years of “reconstruction” between 1902 and 1910. During that period, efficient administrative structures were created, and a relationship developed between Afrikaner politicians and mining capitalists that consolidated the economic dominance of gold. Reconstruction also ensured that settler minorities would prevail over the black majority. Black societies were policed and taxed more effectively, and the new constitution excluded blacks from political power. Racial segregation was further developed through policies proposed during reconstruction and solidified after 1910.

Both Afrikaner and black nationalism utilized new political vehicles. Syndicalist white workers and Afrikaner republican diehards fought against employers and government, their clashes culminating in the Rand Revolt of 1922. Black protests against the new order ranged from genteel lobbying and passive resistance to armed rural revolt, strikes, and mass mobilization.

Milner and reconstruction

High Commissioner Milner transferred his headquarters from Cape Town to Pretoria in 1902. The move symbolized the centrality of the Transvaal to his mission of constructing a new order in South Africa. When Milner departed in 1905, his vision of a country politically dominated by English-speaking whites had failed. Schemes to flood the rural Transvaal with British settlers yielded only a trickle, and, worse yet, compulsory Anglicization of education only intensified feelings of Afrikaner nationalism. Opposition to “Milnerism” defined the emergent political groups led by former Boer generals Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, and J.B.M. (Barry) Hertzog. Milner had hoped to withhold self-rule from whites in South Africa until “there are three men of British race to two of Dutch.” But, when Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal ministry granted responsible government to the former republics in 1907, Afrikaner parties won elections in the Transvaal.

Yet, if Milner’s political design failed to take shape, he did largely realize his blueprint for economic and social engineering. Served by a group of handpicked young administrators, he made economic recovery a priority because it was imperative to restore the mines to profitability. He lowered rail rates and tariffs on imports and abolished the expensive concessions granted by the Kruger regime. Milner also made strenuous efforts to ensure cheap labour to the mines. To achieve this goal, he authorized the importation of some 60,000 Chinese indentured labourers when black migrants resisted wage cuts. Chinese miners, who would mostly return home by 1910, performed only certain tasks, but their employment set a precedent for a statutory colour bar in the gold mines. Although this experiment provoked political outcries in the Transvaal and in Britain, it succeeded in undercutting the bargaining power of black workers. The value of gold production swelled from £16 million in 1904 to £27 million by 1907.

The administration worked to remodel the Transvaal as a stable base for agricultural, industrial, and finance capital, spending some £16 million to return Afrikaners to their farms and equip them. It established a land bank, promoted scientific farming methods, and developed more-efficient tax-collection methods, which increased pressures on black peasants to work for white farmers. Especially on the Witwatersrand, the young administrators tackled town planning, public transport, housing, and sanitation, and in each of these spheres a new urban geography proceeded from the principle of separating white and black workers.

The South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) was appointed to provide comprehensive answers to “the native question.” Its report (1905) proposed territorial separation of black and white landownership, systematic urban segregation by the creation of black “locations,” the removal of black “squatters” from white farms and their replacement by wage labourers, and the segregation of blacks from whites in the political sphere. These (and other SANAC recommendations) provided the basis for laws passed between 1910 and 1936.

Convention and union

Concern in London over the electoral victory by the Afrikaner party Het Volk evaporated as soon as it became clear that both Botha and Smuts understood the economic preeminence of mining capital. A policy of reconciliation between Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites was also promoted.

A national convention, which met in Durban in 1908–09, drafted a constitution. Afrikaner leaders and Cape Premier John X. Merriman opted for a unitary state with Dutch and English as official languages and with parliamentary sovereignty. Executive authority was vested in a governor-general who would be advised by a cabinet from the governing party. Two “entrenched” clauses, on language and franchise, could be amended only by a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament. While Cape delegates favoured a colour-blind franchise, those from the Transvaal and Orange Free State demanded an exclusively white electorate. A compromise simply confirmed existing electoral arrangements. The former republics retained white male adult suffrage and did not consider female suffrage (white women finally won the right to vote in 1930). In 1910, 85 percent of Cape voters were white, 10 percent Coloured, and 5 percent black. Representation was further limited on racial lines: even in the Cape, only whites could stand for Parliament.

Black, Coloured, and Indian political responses

The South African War occurred at a time when many black communities suffered under great hardship. During the 1890s, drought and cattle disease (particularly rinderpest) impoverished pastoralists, while competition increased for black land and labour. During the war, most black South Africans identified with the British cause because imperial politicians assured them that “equal laws, equal liberty” for all races would prevail after a Boer defeat.

However, the Treaty of Vereeniging (see Vereeniging, Peace of ) withdrew such promises, and a sense of betrayal stimulated political protest, especially among mission-educated blacks. Various organizations arose to counter the impending union of white-ruled provinces by ethnically and regionally uniting blacks. In response to the constitutional convention, blacks held their own (the South African Native Convention) in Bloemfontein. This provided an important step toward the formation of a permanent national black political organization. Such an organization was finally founded on Jan. 8, 1912, when the South African Native National Congress (from 1923 the African National Congress; ANC) came into existence. Not all black protest occurred through the new middle-class organizations, however. Some black farmers from Natal refused to pay a poll tax in 1906, and their resistance developed into an armed rising led by Bambatha, a Zulu chief. At the end of this “reluctant rebellion,” between 3,000 and 4,000 blacks had been killed and many thousands imprisoned.

Parallel developments took place among politically conscious Coloureds and Indians. Their first nationally based organization was the African Political (later People’s) Organization, founded in Cape Town in 1902. Under the presidency of Abdullah Abdurahman, this body lobbied for Coloured rights and had links at times with other black political groups. Indians in the Transvaal, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, also resisted discriminatory legislation. Gandhi spent the years 1893 to 1914 in South Africa as a legal agent for Indian merchants in Natal and the Transvaal. Between 1906 and 1909, in protest against a Transvaal registration law requiring Indians to carry passes, Gandhi first implemented the methods of satyagraha (nonviolent noncompliance), which he later used with great effect in India.

Union and disunity

Supported by the majority party in each province and by the British government, Louis Botha formed the first union government in May 1910. The Botha administration entered a period of continuous change and violent conflict as tensions arose from issues left unresolved by the constitution, from rapid but uneven economic growth, and from the legacy of conquest and dispossession of the indigenous peoples.

One source of conflict was the relationship between employers and organized white workers. The Chamber of Mines and miners’ trade unions on the Witwatersrand engaged in combat for a decade and a half. Whenever violent confrontations flared up—as they did in 1907, 1913, and 1914—the government deployed troops to end the strikes. White workers suspended strike action during World War I, but militancy returned in 1919, this time fueled by inflation. The Chamber of Mines announced in December 1921 that, because of rising costs and a falling gold price, it planned on replacing semiskilled white workers with lower-paid blacks. A miners’ protest stoppage in January 1922 became a general strike, and in March it developed into an armed rising, with strikers organized as commandos. Jan Smuts, prime minister since Botha’s death in 1919, used artillery and aircraft to crush what became known as the Rand Revolt, at a cost of some 200 lives. This intense conflict between white unions and employers ended with the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act in 1924, which set up new state structures for regulating industrial conflicts.

Black workers also engaged in sporadic strikes before, during, and after World War I, giving rise to the first black trade unions. More than 70,000 African gold miners halted production for a week when they struck for higher wages in February 1920. Soldiers and police broke the strike, but not before 11 miners died and more than 100 were injured. This strike was part of a wave of protest in several cities as inflation eroded the real wages of black workers.

Afrikaner rebellion and nationalism

When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, South Africa’s dominion status meant that it was automatically at war, and its troops mobilized to invade German South West Africa. This sparked a rebellion led by former Boer generals, who held high-ranking positions as officers in the Union Defence Force. Some 10,000 soldiers, mainly poverty-stricken rural Afrikaners, joined the rising. The government used 32,000 troops to suppress it, and more than 300 men lost their lives in the fighting.

The rebellion, though, was an atypical episode in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism as a political force. More-telling responses came from those Afrikaners who had been profoundly affected by economic change, war, and reconstruction. After 1902, thousands of landless families streamed into the cities, indicating the extent to which the prewar rural social order had crumbled. One response to the threat of further disintegration was a “second language movement” spearheaded by teachers, clergymen, journalists, and lawyers who felt deeply threatened by the cultural dominance of English speakers. It succeeded in its immediate aim when Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language in 1925.

J.B.M. Hertzog founded the National Party in 1914, with support mainly from “poor whites” and militant intellectuals. The general election of 1915 gave the National Party 30 percent of the vote, with Afrikaners deserting the South African Party led by Botha and Smuts. Hertzog’s party won a majority of both seats and votes in 1920 on a platform of republicanism and separate school systems for Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites. The June 1924 election propelled Hertzog to the position of prime minister through a coalition between the National and Labour parties known as the Pact government.

Segregation

In the first two decades of the union, segregation became a distinctive feature of South African political, social, and economic life as whites addressed the “native question.” Blacks were “retribalized” and their ethnic differences highlighted. New statutes provided for racial separation in industrial, territorial, administrative, and residential spheres. This barrage of legislation was partly the product of reactionary attitudes inherited from the past and partly an effort to regulate class and race relations during a period of rapid industrialization when the black population was growing steadily.

The 1911 Mines and Works Act and its 1926 successor reserved certain jobs in mining and the railways for white workers. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 defined less than one-tenth of South Africa as black “reserves” and prohibited any purchase or lease of land by blacks outside the reserves. The law also restricted the terms of tenure under which blacks could live on white-owned farms. The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 segregated urban residential space and created “influx controls” to reduce access to cities by blacks. Hertzog proposed increasing the reserve areas and removing black voters in the Cape from the common roll in 1926, aims that were finally realized through the Representation of Natives Act (1936). Blacks now voted on a separate roll to elect three white representatives to the House of Assembly.

The Pact years (1924–33)

Hertzog’s Pact government strengthened South Africa’s autonomy, aided local capital, and protected white workers against black competition. Hertzog also played a leading role at the Imperial Conference in London that issued the Balfour Report (1926), establishing autonomy in foreign affairs for the dominions. When he returned from Britain, Hertzog turned his attention to creating the symbols of nationalism—flag and anthem. Economic nationalism included protective tariffs for local industry, subsidies to facilitate agricultural exports, and a state-run iron and steel industry. White trade unions grew more bureaucratic and less militant, although their members enjoyed at best modest material gains. Unskilled and nonunionized whites who received support through sheltered employment in the public sector and through prescribed minimum wages in the private sector gained more directly. Although the overall level of white poverty remained high, through these policies the manufacturing sector absorbed white labour nearly twice as fast as black.

Blacks gained little during this period and continued to lose earlier benefits. For them, segregation meant restricted mobility, diminished opportunities, more-stringent controls, and a general sense of exclusion. Economic conditions in the reserves continued to deteriorate; the terms of tenancy became more onerous on white-owned farms; and the urban slums provided a harsh alternative for those who left the land.

The first mass-based black political organization, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), flourished in response to deteriorating conditions. Until 1926 the ICU was a Cape-based organization with black and some Coloured members drawn mainly from urban areas. As a broadly based vehicle of rural protest, it had many thousands of supporters among black tenants on white farms. The ICU linked innumerable local rural grievances with a generalized call for land and liberation, but by 1929 its influence had declined. However, other organizations built on its base. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921, was at first active almost solely within white trade unions, but from 1925 it recruited black members more energetically, and in 1928–29 it called for black majority rule and closer cooperation with the ANC. Its connection to the ANC occurred most prominently with Josiah Gumede (president 1927–30), whose political views moved leftward in the late 1920s. This led to a split in the ANC in 1930 as the more moderate members expelled the more radical ones.

The 1929 general election reflected the political challenges to white supremacy. For the first time since union, questions of “native policy” dominated white electoral politics. Afrikaner nationalists made “black peril” and “communist menace” their rallying cries. It was not to be the last such occasion.

The apartheid years

The intensification of apartheid in the 1930s

The Hertzog government achieved a major goal in 1931 when the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, which removed the last vestiges of British legal authority over South Africa. Three years later the South African Parliament secured that decision by enacting the Status of the Union Act, which declared the country to be “a sovereign independent state.”

Although Hertzog’s National Party held a majority of the seats in the House of Assembly and dominated the South African cabinet in the early 1930s, its mismanagement of problems created by the Great Depression led him to form a coalition with his rival Smuts in 1933. Smuts was the leader of the South African Party, whose support came from the major industrialists and which was the party of most of the English-speaking whites (who made up less than half of the white population). In contrast, the National Party derived its main support from Afrikaner farmers and intellectuals. By 1934 the two organizations had merged to form the United Party, with Hertzog as prime minister and Smuts his deputy. The two parties and the two leaders had a common interest in favouring the enfranchised population, nearly all of whom were white, over the unenfranchised, all of whom were black. They agreed to provide massive support for white farmers, to assist poor whites by providing them with jobs protected from black competition, and to curb the movement of blacks from the reserves into the towns. Meanwhile, National Party member Daniel F. Malan disagreed with the merger of the parties and chose to keep the National Party functioning.

The earnings from South Africa’s gold exports increased sharply after Britain and the United States abandoned the gold standard in the early 1930s. White farmers prospered; new secondary industries were established; and South Africans of all races continued to flock to the towns. South Africa changed from a predominantly rural country that exported raw materials and imported manufactured consumer goods into a country with a diverse economy. Although the standard of living for most whites improved greatly from this expansion, the lives of Coloureds, blacks, and Indians were hardly affected. The government did add some land to the reserves in 1936, but it never exceeded 13 percent of the area of the country. Until the end of apartheid, almost nine-tenths of South Africa—including the best land for agriculture and the bulk of the mineral deposits—belonged exclusively to whites. Unsurprisingly, conditions on the native reserves became progressively worse through overpopulation and soil erosion. The government attempted to resolve these problems through a series of programs called Betterment Schemes, which involved keeping tight control over land use in the reserves, often drastically culling cattle, and enforcing the building of contour ridges to reduce soil erosion. Overcrowding in the reserves made it necessary for a high proportion of the men to work for wages elsewhere—on white farms or in the towns, where they lived in a hostile world. Black and Coloured farm labourers, scattered in small groups throughout the agricultural areas, were isolated, and in the towns life was insecure and wages low. In the gold-mining industry the real wages of blacks declined by about one-seventh between 1911 and 1941; white miners received 12 times the salary of blacks.

Education for blacks was left largely to Christian missions, whose resources, even when augmented by small government grants, enabled them to enroll only a small proportion of the black population. Missionaries did, however, run numerous schools, including some excellent high schools that took a few pupils through to the university level; and missionaries were the dominant influence at the South African Native College at Fort Hare (founded 1916), which included degree courses. These institutions educated a small but increasing number of blacks, who secured teaching jobs and positions in the lower reaches of the civil service or functioned as clergy (especially in the independent churches that had broken away from mainstream white churches).

Educated blacks were frustrated by the fact that whites did not treat them as equals, and some of them took part in opposition politics in the ANC. However, the ANC and two parallel movements—the African Political Organization (a Coloured group) and the South African Indian Congress—had little popular support and exerted little influence during this period. Their leaders were mission-educated men who had liberal goals and used strictly constitutional methods, such as petitions to the authorities. The radical African ICU had collapsed by 1930, and the CPSA made little headway among blacks.

World War II

When Britain declared war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, the United Party split. Hertzog wanted South Africa to remain neutral, but Smuts opted for joining the British war effort. Smuts’s faction narrowly won the crucial parliamentary debate, and Hertzog and his followers left the party, many rejoining the National Party faction Malan had maintained since 1934. Smuts then became the prime minister, and South Africa declared war on Germany.

South Africa made significant contributions to the Allied war effort. Some 135,000 white South Africans fought in the East and North African and Italian campaigns, and 70,000 blacks and Coloureds served as labourers and transport drivers. South African platinum, uranium, and steel became valuable resources, and, during the period that the Mediterranean Sea was closed to the Allies, Durban and Cape Town provisioned a vast number of ships en route from Britain to the Suez.

The war proved to be an economic stimulant for South Africa, although wartime inflation and lagging wages contributed to social protests and strikes after the end of the war. Driven by reduced imports, the manufacturing and service industries expanded rapidly, and the flow of blacks to the towns became a flood. By the war’s end, more blacks than whites lived in the towns. They set up vast squatter camps on the outskirts of the cities and improvised shelters from whatever materials they could find. They also began to flex their political muscles. Blacks boycotted a Witwatersrand bus company that tried to raise fares, they formed trade unions, and in 1946 more than 60,000 black gold miners went on strike for higher wages and improved living conditions.

Although the 1946 strike was brutally suppressed by the government, white intellectuals did propose a series of reforms within the segregation framework. The government and private industry made a few concessions, such as easing the industrial colour bar, increasing black wages, and relaxing the pass laws, which restricted the right of blacks to live and work in white areas. The government, however, failed to discuss these problems with black representatives.

Afrikaners felt threatened by the concessions given to blacks and created a series of ethnic organizations to promote their interests, including an economic association, a federation of Afrikaans cultural associations, and the Afrikaner Broederbond, a secret society of Afrikaner cultural leaders. During the war many Afrikaners welcomed the early German victories, and some of them even committed acts of sabotage.

The United Party, which had won the general election in 1943 by a large majority, approached the 1948 election complacently. While the party appeared to take an ambiguous position on race relations, Malan’s National Party took an unequivocally pro-white stance. The National Party claimed that the government’s weakness threatened white supremacy and produced a statement that used the word apartheid to describe a program of tightened segregation and discrimination. With the support of a tiny fringe group, the National Party won the election by a narrow margin.

The National Party and apartheid

After its victory the National Party rapidly consolidated its control over the state and in subsequent years won a series of elections with increased majorities. Parliament removed Coloured voters from the common voters’ rolls in 1956. By 1969 the electorate was exclusively white: Indians never had any parliamentary representation, and the seats for white representatives of blacks and Coloureds had been abolished.

One plank of the National Party platform was for South Africa to become a republic, preferably outside the Commonwealth. The issue was presented to white voters in 1960 as a way to bring about white unity, especially because of concern with the problems that the Belgian Congo was then experiencing as it became independent. By a simple majority the voters approved the republic status. The government structure would change only slightly: the governor-general would be replaced by a state president, who would be chosen by Parliament. At a meeting in London in March 1961, South Africa had hoped to retain its Commonwealth status, but, when other members criticized it over its apartheid policies, it withdrew from the organization and on May 31, 1961, became the Republic of South Africa.

The government vigorously furthered its political goals by making it compulsory for white children to attend schools that were conducted in their home language, either Afrikaans or English (except for the few who went to private schools). It advanced Afrikaners to top positions in the civil service, army, and police and in such state corporations as the South African Broadcasting Corporation. It also awarded official contracts to Afrikaner banks and insurance companies. These methods raised the living standard of Afrikaners closer to that of English-speaking white South Africans.

Following a recession in the early 1960s, the economy grew rapidly until the late 1970s. By that time, owing to the efforts of public and private enterprise, South Africa had developed a modern infrastructure, by far the most advanced in Africa. It possessed efficient financial institutions, a national network of roads and railways, modernized port facilities in Cape Town and Durban, long-established mining operations producing a wealth of diamonds, gold, and coal, and a range of industries. De Beers Consolidated Mines and the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, dominated the private sector, forming the core of one of the world’s most powerful networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies and employing some 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations (parastatals) controlled industries vital to national security. South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation (SASOL) was established in 1950 to make South Africa self-sufficient in petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel. After the United Nations (UN) placed a ban on arms exports to South Africa in 1964, Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) was created to produce high-quality military equipment.

The man who played a major part in transforming apartheid from an election slogan into practice was Hendrik F. Verwoerd. Born in The Netherlands, Verwoerd immigrated with his parents to South Africa when he was a child. He became minister of native affairs in 1950 and was prime minister from 1958 until 1966, when Dimitri Tsafendas, a Coloured man, assassinated him in Parliament. (Tsafendas was judged to be insane and was confined to a mental institution after the murder.) Verwoerd’s successor, B.J. Vorster, had been minister of justice, police, and prisons, and he shared Verwoerd’s philosophy of white supremacy. In Verwoerd’s vision, South Africa’s population contained four distinct racial groups—white, black, Coloured, and Asian—each with an inherent culture. Because whites were the “civilized” group, they were entitled to control the state.

The all-white Parliament passed many laws to legalize and institutionalize the apartheid system. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the government and empowered the government to detain anyone it thought might further “communist” aims. The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture, or to kill in the pursuit of official duties. Later laws gave the police the right to arrest and detain people without trial and to deny them access to their families or lawyers. Other laws and regulations collectively known as “petty apartheid” segregated South Africans in every sphere of life: in buses, taxis, and hearses, in cinemas, restaurants, and hotels, in trains and railway waiting rooms, and in access to beaches. When a court declared that separate amenities should be equal, Parliament passed a special law to override it.

“Grand apartheid,” in contrast, related to the physical separation of the racial groups in the cities and countryside. Under the Group Areas Act (1950) the cities and towns of South Africa were divided into segregated residential and business areas. Thousands of Coloureds, blacks, and Indians were removed from areas classified for white occupation.

Blacks were treated like “tribal” people and were required to live on reserves under hereditary chiefs except when they worked temporarily in white towns or on white farms. The government began to consolidate the scattered reserves into 8 (eventually 10) distinct territories, designating each of them as the “homeland,” or Bantustan, of a specific black ethnic community. The government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Arguing that Bantustans matched the decolonization process then taking place in tropical Africa, the government devolved powers onto those administrations and eventually encouraged them to become “independent.” Between 1976 and 1981 four accepted independence—Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei—though none was ever recognized by a foreign government. Like the other homelands, however, they were economic backwaters, dependent on subsidies from Pretoria.

Conditions in the homelands continued to deteriorate, partly because they had to accommodate vast numbers of people with minimal resources. Many people found their way to the towns; but the government, attempting to reverse this flood, strengthened the pass laws by making it illegal for blacks to be in a town for more than 72 hours at a time without a job in a white home or business. A particularly brutal series of forced removals were conducted from the 1960s to the early ’80s, in which more than 3.5 million blacks were taken from towns and white rural areas (including lands they had occupied for generations) and dumped into the reserves, sometimes in the middle of winter and without any facilities.

The government also established direct control over the education of blacks. The Bantu Education Act (1953) took black schools away from the missions, and more state-run schools—especially at the elementary level—were created to meet the expanding economy’s increasing demand for semiskilled black labour. The Extension of University Education Act (1959) prohibited the established universities from accepting black students, except with special permission. Instead, the government created new ethnic university colleges—one each for Coloureds, Indians, and Zulus and one for Sotho, Tswana, and Venda students, as well as a medical school for blacks. The South African Native College at Fort Hare, which missionaries had founded primarily but not exclusively for blacks, became a state college solely for Xhosa students. The government staffed these ethnic colleges with white supporters of the National Party and subjected the students to stringent controls.

Resistance to apartheid

Apartheid imposed heavy burdens on most South Africans. The economic gap between the wealthy few, nearly all of whom were white, and the poor masses, virtually all of whom were black, Coloured, or Indian, was larger than in any other country in the world. While whites generally lived well, Indians, Coloureds, and especially blacks suffered from widespread poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Most South Africans struggled daily for survival despite the growth of the national economy.

After the ANC Youth League emerged in the early 1940s, the ANC itself came to life again under a vigorous president, Albert Luthuli, and three younger men—Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and Nelson Mandela (the latter two briefly had a joint law practice in Johannesburg). The South African Indian Congress, which had also been revitalized, helped the ANC organize a defiance campaign in 1952, during which thousands of volunteers defied discriminatory laws by passively courting arrest and burning their pass books. A mass meeting held three years later, called Congress of the People, included Indians, Coloureds, and sympathetic whites. The Freedom Charter was adopted, asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white, and no Government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.” The government broke up the meeting, subsequently arrested more than 150 people, and charged them with high treason. Although the trial did not result in any guilty verdicts, it dragged on until 1961. To prevent further gatherings, the government passed the Prohibition of Political Interference Act (1968), which banned the formation and foreign financing of nonracial political parties.

Robert Sobukwe, a language teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand, led a group of blacks who broke away from the ANC in 1959 and founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) because they believed that the ANC’s alliance with white, Coloured, and Indian organizations had impeded the struggle for black liberation. The PAC launched a fresh antipass campaign in March 1960, and thousands of unarmed blacks invited arrest by presenting themselves at police stations without passes. At Sharpeville, a black township near Johannesburg, the police opened fire on the crowd outside a police station. At least 67 blacks were killed and more than 180 wounded, most of them shot in the back. Thousands of workers then went on strike, and in Cape Town some 30,000 blacks marched in a peaceful protest to the centre of the city. Rebellion in rural areas such as Pondoland also erupted at this time against the controls of homeland authorities. The government reestablished control by force by mobilizing the army, outlawing the ANC and the PAC, and arresting more than 11,000 people under emergency regulations.

After Sharpeville the ANC and PAC leaders and some of their white sympathizers came to the conclusion that apartheid could never be overcome by peaceful means alone. PAC established an armed wing called Poqo, and the ANC set up its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), in 1961. Although their military units detonated several bombs in government buildings during the next few years, the ANC and PAC did not pose a serious threat to the state, which had a virtual monopoly on modern weaponry. By 1964 the government had captured many of the leaders, including Mandela and Sobukwe, and they were sentenced to long terms at the prison on Robben Island in Table Bay, off Cape Town. Other perpetrators of acts of sabotage, including John Harris (who was white), were hanged. Hundreds of others fled the country, and Tambo presided over the ANC’s executive headquarters in Zambia.

The unraveling of apartheid

The government was successful at containing opposition for almost a decade, and foreign investment that had been briefly withdrawn in the early 1960s returned. Such conditions proved to be only temporary, however.

A new phase of resistance began in 1973 when black trade unions organized a series of strikes for higher wages and improved working conditions. Stephen Biko and other black students founded the Black Peoples Convention (BPC) in 1972 and inaugurated what was loosely termed the Black Consciousness movement, which appealed to blacks to take pride in their own culture and proved immensely attractive.

On June 16, 1976, thousands of children in Soweto, an African township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the government’s insistence that they be taught in Afrikaans rather than in English. When the police opened fire with tear gas and then bullets, the incident initiated a nationwide cycle of protest and repression. Using its usual tactics, the government banned many organizations such as the BPC, and within a year the police had killed more than 500, including Biko. These events focused worldwide attention on South Africa. The UN General Assembly had denounced apartheid in 1973; four years later the UN Security Council voted unanimously to impose a mandatory embargo on the export of arms to South Africa.

The illusion that apartheid would bring peace to South Africa had shattered by 1978. Most of the homelands proved to be economic and political disasters: labour was their only significant export, and most of their leadership was corrupt and unpopular. The national economy entered a period of recession, coupled with high inflation, and many skilled whites emigrated. South Africa, increasingly isolated as the last bastion of white racial domination on the continent, became the focus of global denunciation.

At that time the leadership of the National Party passed to a new class of urban Afrikaners—business leaders and intellectuals who, like their English-speaking white counterparts, believed that reforms should be introduced to appease foreign and domestic critics. Pieter W. Botha succeeded B.J. Vorster as prime minister in August 1978, and his government introduced some reforms, but it also increased state controls. It repealed the bans on interracial sex and marriage, desegregated many hotels, restaurants, trains, and buses, removed the reservation of skilled jobs for whites, and repealed the pass laws. Provided that black trade unions registered, they received access to a new industrial court, and they legally could strike. A new constitution was promulgated that created separate parliamentary bodies for Indians and for Coloureds, but it also vested great powers in an executive president, namely Botha.

The Botha reforms, however, stopped short of making any real change in the distribution of power. The white parliamentary chamber could override the Coloured and Indian chambers on matters of national significance, and all blacks remained disenfranchised. The Group Areas Act and the Land Acts maintained residential segregation. Schools and health and welfare services for blacks, Indians, and Coloureds remained segregated and inferior, and most nonwhites, especially blacks, were still desperately poor. Moreover, Botha used the State Security Council, which was dominated by military officers, rather than the cabinet as his major policy-making body, and he embarked on a massive military buildup. Military service for white males, already universal, increased from nine months to two years and included annual reserve duty.

South Africa’s black neighbours formed the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference in 1979 in an effort to limit South Africa’s economic domination of the region, but it made little progress. Most of the export trade from the region continued to pass through the country to South African ports, and South Africa provided employment for some 280,000 migrant workers from neighbouring countries. Botha also used South Africa’s military strength to restrain its neighbours from pursuing antiapartheid policies. The South African Defense Force (SADF) assisted the Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) rebels in Mozambique and the UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) faction in Angola’s civil war. SADF troops entered Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, and Mozambique in order to make preemptive attacks on ANC groups and their allies in these countries. Botha kept what was then called South West Africa/Namibia under South African domination in defiance of the UN, which had withdrawn the mandate it had granted to South Africa over the region. The country even produced a few nuclear weapons, the testing of which was detected in 1979. Increasingly, South African dissidents from all race groups were harassed, banned, or detained in prison without necessarily being charged under renewable 90-day detention sentences.

During the 1980s the conservative administrations of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President Ronald Reagan in the United States faced increasingly insistent pressures for sanctions against South Africa. A high-level Commonwealth mission went to South Africa in 1986 in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the government to suspend its military actions in the townships, release political prisoners, and stop destabilizing neighbouring countries. Later that year American public resentment of South Africa’s racial policies was strong enough for the U.S. Congress to pass—over a presidential veto—the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which banned new investments and loans, ended air links, and prohibited the importation of many commodities. Other governments took similar actions.

The struggle intensified during the early 1980s and became further polarized. The new constitution of 1983 attempted to split the opposition to apartheid by meeting Indian and Coloured grievances while at the same time giving blacks no political rights except in the homelands. In response, more than 500 community groups formed the United Democratic Front, which became closely identified with the exiled ANC. Strikes, boycotts, and attacks on black police and urban councillors began escalating, and a state of emergency was declared in many parts of the country in 1985; a year later the government promulgated a nationwide state of emergency and embarked on a campaign to eliminate all opposition. For three years policemen and soldiers patrolled the black townships in armed vehicles. They destroyed black squatter camps and detained, abused, and killed thousands of blacks, while the army continued its forays into neighbouring countries. Rigid censorship laws tried to conceal those actions by banning television, radio, and newspaper coverage.

The brute force used by the government did not halt dissent. Long-standing critics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, defied the government, and influential Afrikaner clerics and intellectuals withdrew their support. Resistance by black workers continued, including a massive strike by the National Union of Mineworkers, and saboteurs caused an increasing number of deaths and injuries. The economy suffered severe strain from the costs of sanctions, administering apartheid, and military adventurism, especially in Namibia and Angola. The gross domestic product decreased; annual inflation rose above 14 percent; and investment capital became scarce. Moreover, in 1988 the army suffered a military setback in Angola, after which the government signed an accord paving the way for the removal of Cuban troops that had been sent to Angola and for the UN-supervised independence of Namibia in 1990. Given these circumstances, many whites came to realize that there was no stopping the incorporation of blacks into the South African political system.

Government officials held several discussions with imprisoned ANC leader Mandela as these events unfolded, but Botha balked at the idea of allowing blacks to participate in the political system. National Party dissent against Botha in 1989 forced him to step down as both party leader and president. The National Party parliamentary caucus subsequently chose F.W. de Klerk, the party’s Transvaal provincial leader, as his successor. More than 20 years younger than Botha, de Klerk exhibited more sensitivity to the dynamics of a world where, as democracy arose in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the blatant racism that still existed in South Africa could no longer be tolerated. De Klerk announced a program of radical change in a dramatic address to Parliament on Feb. 2, 1990; nine days later Mandela was released from prison. During the next year Parliament repealed the basic apartheid laws, lifted the state of emergency, freed many political prisoners, and allowed exiles to return to South Africa.

Postapartheid South Africa

The Mandela presidency

Transition to majority rule

Mandela was elected president of the ANC in 1991, succeeding Tambo, who was in poor health and died two years later. Mandela and de Klerk, who both wanted to reach a peaceful solution to South Africa’s problems, met with representatives of most of the political organizations in the country, with a mandate to draw up a new constitution. These negotiations took place amid pervasive and escalating violence, especially in the southern Transvaal, the industrial heart of the country, and in Natal. Most of the conflicts in the Transvaal occurred between Zulu migrant workers, who were housed in large hostels, and the residents of the adjacent townships. The conflicts in Natal existed mainly between Zulu supporters of the ANC and members of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a Zulu movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who was chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland.

As the bargaining continued, both Mandela and de Klerk made concessions, with the result that both of them ran the risk of losing the support of their respective constituencies. While whites were loath to forfeit their power and privileges, blacks had hoped to win complete control of the state. A majority of white voters endorsed the negotiating process in a referendum in 1992, but both white and black extremists tried to sabotage the process through various acts of terror.

Mandela and de Klerk finally reached a peaceful agreement on the future of South Africa at the end of 1993, an achievement for which they jointly received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, leaders of 18 other parties endorsed an interim constitution, which was to take effect immediately after South Africa’s first election by universal suffrage, scheduled for April 1994. A parliament to be elected at that time would oversee the drafting of a permanent constitution for the country. The temporary constitution enfranchised all citizens 18 and older, abolished the homelands, and divided the country into nine new provinces, with provincial governments receiving substantial powers. It also contained a long list of political and social rights and a mechanism through which blacks could regain ownership of land that had been taken away under apartheid.

The ANC won almost two-thirds of the 1994 vote, the National Party slightly more than one-fifth, and the IFP most of the rest; all three received proportional cabinet representation. The ANC also became the majority party in seven of the provinces, but the IFP won a majority in KwaZulu-Natal, and the National Party—supported by mixed-race (people formerly classified as “Coloured” under apartheid) as well as white voters—won a majority in Western Cape. Mandela was sworn in as president of the new South Africa on May 10 before a vast jubilant crowd that included the secretary-general of the UN, 45 heads of state, and delegations from many other countries. Thabo Mbeki, a top official in the ANC, and de Klerk both became deputy presidents.

The new, multiparty “government of national unity” aimed to provide Africans with improved education, housing, electricity, running water, and sanitation. Recognizing that economic growth was essential for such purposes, the ANC adopted a moderate economic policy, dropping the socialist elements that had characterized its earlier programs. Mandela and his colleagues campaigned vigorously for foreign aid and investment, but capital investment entered the new South Africa slowly.

The government also had to grapple with a host of daunting institutional problems associated with the transition to a postapartheid society. Blacks joined the civil service; antiapartheid guerrillas became members of the police and the army; and new municipal governments that embraced both the old white cities and their black township satellites sprang into existence. Labour disputes, criminal violence, and conflict between Zulu factions, especially in KwaZulu-Natal, continued. The IFP (which supported a new provincial constitution that granted a sweeping autonomy to KwaZulu-Natal but was struck down by the Constitutional Court) refused to participate in the process that resulted in the creation of the new national constitution that Parliament passed in May 1996. Parliament revised the constitution in October after it was reviewed by the Constitutional Court; Mandela signed it into law in December of the same year. Also in 1996, the National Party left the government to form a “dynamic but responsible” opposition.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The most important domestic agency created during Mandela’s presidency was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established to review atrocities committed during the apartheid years. It was set up in 1995 under the leadership of Archbishop Tutu and was given the power to grant amnesty to those found to have committed “gross violations of human rights” under extenuating circumstances. By the time the TRC delivered its five-volume report in 1999, more than 7,000 applications for amnesty had been reviewed; of those, about 150 had been granted. Applicants not given amnesty were subject to further legal proceedings.

The TRC was the target of widespread criticism: whites saw it as selectively targeting them, and blacks viewed its actions as a charade that allowed perpetrators of heinous crimes to go free. Former president P.W. Botha refused to answer a summons to give testimony to the commission and received a fine and a suspended sentence, although the sentence was later appealed and overturned. Nonetheless, the TRC uncovered information that otherwise would have remained hidden or taken longer to surface. For example, details of the murders of numerous ANC members were exposed, as were the operations of the State Counterinsurgency Unit at Vlakplaas; its commander, Colonel Eugene de Kock, was subsequently sentenced to a long prison term. The commission also investigated those opposed to apartheid. One of the most prominent was Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, who served briefly as a deputy minister in 1994–95. Her attempts to attain other offices ended when the TRC report indicated that she had been involved in apartheid-era violence. The report also allowed many to finally learn the fate of relatives or friends who had “disappeared” at the hands of the authorities.

South Africa since Mandela

Mbeki replaced Mandela as president of the ANC in December 1997 and became president of the country after the ANC’s triumphant win in the June 1999 elections. Mbeki pledged to address economic woes and the need to improve the social conditions in the country. The ANC was again victorious in the April 2004 elections, and Mbeki was elected to serve another term. South Africa had entered the 21st century with enormous problems to resolve, but the smooth transition of power in a government that represented a majority of the people—something unthinkable less than a decade earlier—provided hope that those problems could be addressed peaceably.

Geography

Rita M. Byrnes (ed.), South Africa: A Country Study, 3rd ed. (1997), surveys South African society, economy, politics, and geography. Monica M. Cole, South Africa, 2nd ed. (1966), is a basic, comprehensive physical and human geography. An introduction to the social structure and politics of the country is Bernard Makhosezwe Magubane, The Political Economy of Race and Class in South Africa (

1978

1979, reissued 1990). David M. Smith (ed.), The Apartheid City and Beyond (1992); and Mark Swilling, Richard Humphries, and Khehla Shubane (eds.), Apartheid City in Transition (1991), are collections of essays on urbanization, social change, urban politics, and development. Historical studies of the economy include

Robert H. Davies, Capital, State, and White Labour in South Africa, 1900–1960 (1979); and

Belinda Bozzoli, The Political Nature of a Ruling Class: Capital and Ideology in South Africa, 1890–1933 (1981). Contemporary economic conditions are treated in Jill Nattrass, The South African Economy: Its Growth and Change, 2nd ed. (1988); Nicoli Nattrass and Elisabeth Ardington (eds.), The Political Economy of South Africa (1990); Francis Wilson and Mamphela Ramphele, Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge (1989), a study of income distribution and aspects of poverty and unemployment; and Stephen R. Lewis, Jr., The Economics of Apartheid (1990), an excellent review.

History

General

Broad coverage of South Africa’s history is provided in Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (eds.), The Oxford History of South Africa, 2 vol. (1969–71), the only general reference work to make a serious attempt to record the history of all the peoples of the country;

and Merle Lipton and David Hauck (eds.), The Impact of Sanctions on South Africa, 2 vol. (1990). Deon Geldenhuys, The Diplomacy of Isolation: South African Foreign Policy Making (1984), outlines government policies.

Leonard Monteath Thompson, A History of South Africa, rev. ed. (1995), a fluent and elegantly written account; T.R.H. Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History, 5th ed. (2000); Dougie Oakes (ed.), Reader’s Digest Illustrated History of South Africa (1989); Robert Ross, A Concise History of South Africa (1999); Frank Welsh, South Africa: A Narrative History (1999); and J.D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa, 2nd ed. (1994). Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey, Historical Dictionary of South Africa, 2nd ed. (2000), presents useful information on historical topics. Cherryl Walker (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (1990), discusses the changing status of women in the past 100 years.

Prehistory to 1870

Early history is explored in Richard Elphick, Kraal and Castle (1977; also published as Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa, 1985), a detailed study of the interactions between the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope and the Khoekhoe chiefdoms of the region; and Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (eds.), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840, 2nd ed. (1989), essays that review the history comprehensively from the first years of Dutch settlement. David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson, Images of Power: Understanding Bushman Rock Art (1989), is an introduction to the rock paintings of southern Africa.

There is still no good published overview account of the period 1770–1870 in South African history, and there are enormous gaps in knowledge. Nevertheless, the following titles are useful: Clifton C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770–1865 (1992); Ben Maclennan, A Proper Degree of Terror: John Graham and the Cape’s Eastern Frontier (1986), a study of the colonial invasion of the Zuurveld in 1811–12; Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (1983); Nigel Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (1985); Noël Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (1992); Julian Cobbing, “The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo,” Journal of African History, 29(3):487–519 (1988), which argues that the Mfecane is largely a creation of early 20th-century South African historians; Carolyn Hamilton (ed.), The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History (1995), which attempts to put the debate on the Mfecane in perspective; J.B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (1981), up to the 1840s, and The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–7 (1989); Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, 2nd ed. (1988), on the emergence of the African peasants after the 1840s; Jeff Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1879–1884 (1979, reissued 1994), mainly on the British invasion of 1879 and its aftermath; and Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (eds.), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (1980), essays on the pre-1900 period. Bill Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society Since 1800, 2nd ed. (1998), examines economic and social conditions in Africa during the 19th and 20th centuries.

1870 to 1930

Useful works on this period include William H. Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895 (1987), a history of diamond mining, paying particular attention to questions of labour recruitment and the rise of De Beers Consolidated Mines; Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture, and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (1982), a collection of essays exploring some of the consequences of an industrial revolution for the country’s African population; Frederick A. Johnstone, Class, Race, and Gold (1976, reprinted 1987), an influential Marxist study of how racial discrimination was institutionalized in the gold-mining industry; T.R.H. Davenport, The Afrikaner Bond: The History of a South African Political Party, 1880–1911 (1966); Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (1979), a highly readable, well-researched popular history; Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop, 8:50–80 (Autumn 1979), an important article that led to the reevaluation of Milner’s role in South Africa; David Yudelman, The Emergence of Modern South Africa: State, Capital, and the Incorporation of Organized Labor on the South African Gold Fields, 1902–1939 (1983); Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress, 1912–1952 (1971, reissued 1987); Helen Bradford, A Taste of Freedom: The ICU in Rural South Africa, 1924–1930 (1987); Gail M. Gerhart, Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (1978); and Ken Luckhardt and Brenda Wall, Organize or Starve!: The History of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (1980).

Since 1930

Numerous books have appeared that chronicle South Africa’s most recent history. Useful works include William Beinart, Twentieth-Century South Africa (1994); and Nigel Worden, The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Segregation, and Apartheid, 2nd ed. (1995). Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman, South Africa’s Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines (1991), deals with the ways in which the history of the region has been connected through labour migrancy. Francis Wilson, Labour in the South African Gold Mines, 1911–1969 (1972), describes the dependence of South Africa’s premier industry on African migrant workers and details how the mining groups held down miners’ wages so that they were lower in 1969 than in 1911. Randall M. Packard, White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (1989), discusses the interaction between disease and oppressive labour conditions in 20th-century South Africa.

T. Dunbar Moodie, The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil Religion (1975, reprinted 1980), shows how an Afrikaner civil religion, with antecedents dating to the 19th century, contributed to the political victory of the Afrikaner National Party in 1948. Leonard Monteath Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (1985), examines how the mythology of the Afrikaner nationalist movement originated as a myth about liberation from British colonialism but later was used to legitimate the oppression of the black people of South Africa. Dan O’Meara, Volkskapitalisme: Class, Capital, and Ideology in the Development of Afrikaner Nationalism, 1934–1948 (1983), provides a useful account of a crucial period.

George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981), is an illuminating comparison of these two countries. The essays in Hermann Giliomee and Lawrence Schlemmer (eds.), Up Against the Fences: Poverty, Passes, and Privilege in South Africa (1985), describe the forces that led to the massive migration of Africans from the reserves to the cities and show that the government was failing to stop it. David Pallister, Sarah Stewart, and Ian Lepper, South Africa Inc.: The Oppenheimer Empire, rev. and updated ed. (1988), describes the global reach of the great industrial and financial conglomerate centred in the Anglo American Corporation and the De Beers diamond cartel. Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa (1986), details how South African economic, political, and military power was used during the 1980s to destabilize other countries in Southern Africa. William Minter, King Solomon’s Mines Revisited: Western Interests and the Burdened History of Southern Africa (1986), offers a radical critique of the involvement of Britain, the United States, and other Western powers and financial interests in the exploitation of the black people of Southern Africa.

Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (1983), is the basic history of black protest movements since World War II, with detailed examinations of specific campaigns and episodes. Sebastian Mallaby, After Apartheid: The Future of South Africa (1992), explores the options. David Ottaway, Chained Together: Mandela, De Klerk, and the Struggle to Remake South Africa (1993), traces the common commitment of the white and black leaders to the transformation of South Africa. Jacklyn Cock, Colonels & Cadres: War & Gender in South Africa (1991; also published as Women and War in South Africa, 1993), explores the link between war and gender in South Africa in the final apartheid years. Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, The Opening of the Apartheid Mind: Options for the New South Africa (1993), provides a cogent analysis of the complex forces that operate in the new South Africa.

The post-1994 years are covered in T.R.H. Davenport, The Transfer of Power in South Africa (1998); Tom Lodge, South African Politics Since 1994 (1999); and Stephen Ellis, “The New Frontiers of Crime in South Africa,” in Jean-Francois Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Beatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa (1999; originally published in French, 1997). Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull (1998), is a moving account of the deliberations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.